Basic Survival Guide for the Vanguard Online Players
Vanguard online is a very good game. But before you begin this Vanguard adventure, you should know of some Basic Survival Guide. Here we will introduce them. If you are interested in that, read the following information.
I find these guides from vanguardvault.ign by -Avalon-. The link of original topic is here…
BEFORE MOVING
When you first show up in the new world, you need to do a few things before taking your first steps. You will need to optimize your graphics, sound, and layout of items on your user interface (UI). This will allow you to play the game in a much more enjoyable way.
The graphical quality of the game is truly astounding, if you have a couple of jet turbines attached to your video card. Unfortunately, most of us have not yet reached that point. The game still has quite decent graphics, even at the lowest settings (think DAoC after graphics upgrade). Hit Esc on your keyboard to open up your menu and select settings. On the first tab you will find your graphics options. Hit Ctrl-P and you will notice in the upper-right of your screen some green numbers will show up. The object is to keep those numbers at this point (right where you start) between 30 and 40, if not higher. We will first be altering the drop down box that currently has “Balanced”. Check out the green numbers and change that box to the following:
80 – 100: Highest Quality
50 – 80: High Quality
30 – 40: Leave on Balanced
10 – 30: High Performance
0 – 10: Highest Performance
Of course, once you do this, you will have to wait until everything loads again. If the numbers are within the 30 – 40 mark at this point, then good to go, but if not, then go up another level or down a level to get it closer to those numbers.
Once we have something fairly close to those numbers, you can examine the rest of the controls and settings such as grass, trees, LOD’s (load on distance), etc. Possibly scale up or down the screen resolution. Remember though, if you increase resolution, you will have to check those numbers again and possibly move to a different quality setting.
After you are done with those settings, move on to sound. If you think sound is completely optional and do not care about it, disable it for a decent bump in performance. Although, I will warn you, Vanguard has several effects that cause sound alarms, such as invisible creatures detected nearby will trigger an alarm so you will know they are there, or if a chain ability opens up then a chain-like sound will happen to alert you to it. Personally, I am alert enough visually usually that I see these things happen, so I play with the sound off, and instead have an mp3 player going instead. If you wish to play with sound, set each setting to what you wish it to be before going further.
Then we head to Interface settings. If you hover over each setting, you will receive a tool-tip describing each setting. If you wish to move anything around, enable “Layout Mode” and you will see grey boxes with titles for each on your screen. This way you can move them around and structure your playing area just how you wish it to be. Keep in mind that you have two targets, a defensive and an offensive, that we will go into later on. You may wish to keep both of those targets near each other for simplicity’s sake. Also be mindful of where your group list will be.
After you are done with settings, apply them and begin looking at your screen, you will see a chest that you can click, which will open every bag you have in your bag slots, currently that is only one bag (your basic one, which you are stuck with forever, but thankfully is a nice size bag). You have quick access keys for character sheet, abilities, options, etc also. I would suggest going through each and familiarizing yourself with each one and what they do for you.
Check out your hotkey bar and see which abilities you have and what they do. Each character starts with certain abilities: Torch for dark areas (can be lit with K and Shift-K also), Recall that takes you back to your last bind spot (you can hover over it and see where you are bound, also refreshes once per hour), Auto-Attack which will start the basic attack cycle (white damage attacks) on whichever NPC is targeted as your offensive target, and Sprint which will add about 25% to your movement speed but only for 45 seconds (this refreshes once every 5 minutes).
Other than the basic starting hotkeys that everyone gets, you should have a few class specific and one (possibly three in the case of Thestran Human) racial specific abilities. The class specific ones are usually reusable once every few seconds. The racial ones are usually reusable once per 15 or 30 minutes, so be very careful with them and use them wisely for they can really save your character’s life or maybe someone else’s in very close situations. Make sure to memorize those class specific ones very well, for class abilities are your bread ‘n butter in this game, they are why you picked your class over the other classes.
Once you are ready and confident you have a good idea what everything does for now, you are ready to start moving and taking on the first task.
THE FIRST STEP
Look around the area where you start and within a few meters of you should be a person with a yellow shield floating above their head, which means they have a quest they would like to offer you. This person has the first quest you will experience, so walk to them and hail them (right click, double click, or press H after targeting them). They will explain a basic beginner quest that you need to accomplish to continue on your journey, so when given the choice, accept the quest. Notice that after you accept this quest, the shield above their head turns blue; this means that you have an active quest with that NPC.
Usually this quest will involve something similar to “Kill x/y mobs” so turn around and look, those mobs are usually within spitting distance, so target one, and if you are a melee type (uses weapons more than spells) go whack on it with auto-attack and using your abilities, or if you are a caster (use spells more than weapons), then blast it into oblivion. When it is dead, right click on the corpse or type /loot to open a looting window then right-click on each item you want or click on the “Take All” button to loot everything. A /lootall command also achieves the same thing as “Take All”. I will give you the commands on some of these actions because they are important to know later when it comes to making macros (covered in a different tutorial).
Also, you will notice when you killed that NPC that an alert will flash on your screen letting you know how far along you are with your quest. Continue killing and looting until it alerts you that your quest is complete. At this point, head back to that person you talked to earlier, they will have a green shield above there head now, which means that you have completed a quest with that NPC.
They will have the quest listed in their dialogue, click on it and they will prompt you to tell them whether or not it is complete. Complete the quest for a chunk of experience and some coin, possibly an item. Congratulations, you have now completed your first quest!
DON’T STOP YET
Now that you have completed that very first step, do not go wandering around, there are more quests to complete to really get going! That same person you talked to for the first quest should offer you a second quest, and possibly more after that. When you are finished with those quests, they should have led you away from where you started and to other NPC’s. The goal at this point is to get some levels and coin saved up so that you can buy new abilities at your trainer, and to get minor upgrades to your equipment.
As you are running around doing these quests, do not forget to look around for other yellow shields hovering above the NPC’s. If you see any, talk to those people and grab any quests you find. A few of these quest lines will be described below in other sections (crafting, harvesting, and diplomacy).
There are a few other tips for doing quests, also. If you press “L” it will bring up your quest log. In your quest log, select a quest, read through it for clarification on what you are supposed to do to complete it, and at the bottom, you will also sometimes have a special area. This area will have people or places listed with buttons beside them. You can select a button and your compass will now have a red hash on it that will lead you towards your goal. Also, when the button is selected, your mini-map will have a green dot on it to show you the direction and about how far away your goal is from where you currently stand.
Now, along with any adventuring based MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) comes the inevitable, death. Death in Vanguard is a bit harsher than in most games. When you die, your body will lay there on the ground. A box will pop up on your screen giving you the current amount of time left before auto-release and a button that allows you to release before the time is up. If you choose to release, you will leave a tombstone behind and be brought back to life at the nearest altar to where you died, and you will lose a few things. Around 15% of the total experience needed for the current level will be subtracted from your current experience (i.e. if you are 20% into level and die, you will be reduced to 5% into level). If you are too low on experience at the time, this will result in experience debt (i.e. if you are at 10% into level and die, you will be reduced to 0% and have 5% debt). Debt must be paid off before you can continue gaining experience towards your level.
At this point, there are 3 alternatives: Resurrection, Rescue your Tombstone, or Summon your Tombstone. Resurrection cancels all experience loss, or almost all of it and you only take a minor hit to the durability of your items. Rescuing your tombstone cancels all but 1% of your experience loss, and you take a minor hit to durability. But, sometimes rescue is not an option due to where you died, and no healer was present, so you cannot resurrect either. In that case, you can also summon your tombstone to the alter where you were revived. This will result in no experience loss being cancelled and a hefty hit to durability. It is in your best interest to either group with healers, or adventure solo in very safe areas. Travel the rough roads at your own risk!
One other note on dying, there are two types of items in the game: Bindable, and Soulbound. When you die, you will leave behind on your tombstone all items that are not Soulbound to your character. Soulbound items are items that you have either gained through questing, have Soulbound using a binding stone (bought off general goods vendors, they come in stacks of 10 for a very cheap price), or are stored in your saddlebags (gotten later in game around level 10 or onwards when you get your horse, which is discussed more in the travel section). The downside to Soulbound items is that you cannot give those items to other players, nor can you sell them to other players via the Exchange Broker. Only Bindable items can be given to other players or sold via Broker. The only two ways to get rid of Soulbound items are to either destroy the item, or to sell it to an NPC vendor for dramatically less than you could get by selling on the Exchange Broker. So be very careful about making things Soulbound. A good tactic to avoid this decision is to have saddlebags that carry a spare set of equipment so that when you release, you can re-equip your character and run back to rescue your tombstone.
Of course, there is a safety buffer built into the game to allow you to learn a small bit before having to deal with these problems, so you are safe from the penalties of death, but not death itself, until you reach level seven.
RANGED ATTACKS
Ranged attacks are a necessary component to the game. If you do not have one yet, get one. A spell will suffice if you do not have the ability to use any other form of ranged attack, but keep in mind the max range on spells is usually a short distance, whereas a bow or crossbow has a longer distance. Some spells will still have good ranges though.
Physical ranged attacks (bows, crossbows, thrown weapons) have damage based on dexterity, so you may want to focus on that some, along with other reasons (parry, dodge, chance to land a critical hit with physical weaponry, etc). Magical ranged attacks have damage based on two different abilities: intelligence and wisdom. Intelligence will affect your overall spell damage, while wisdom will help determine your chance to critically hit with spells.
Of course, there is a class in the game that has a specialty in ranged weapons: the Ranger. Rangers have several different special attacks that utilize ranged weaponry: Critical Shot, Deadly Shot, Dawn Arrow, Splitting Shot, etc. Other classes have abilities that use a ranged weapon, but are not nearly as specialized in ranged attacks as the ranger.
Ranged attacks are the main way to pull a mob, meaning to get an NPC’s attention then have it follow you back to a safe place to fight it, usually with a group to help you kill it. It allows for you to not have to wander deep into a group of NPC’s to grab one or a few, and to see if you will have too many way before they are actually attacking you. You can buy ranged weapons and ammo from a Ranged Weapon Vendor, but can buy very basic weaponry from a general goods vendor. Make sure that if you plan on using a physical ranged attack that you stock up on enough ammo to last you between visits to town. You may also wish to make the small investment in buying a quiver or bolt case to carry your arrows or bolts.
HARVESTING
There are two main reasons to harvest: to gather resources for use in crafting and to gather resources to sell to others for them to use in crafting. Harvesting is the skill that enables a character to gather resources from the world around them. The harvesting skills are reaping (plants), lumberjacking (wood), quarrying (rocks and gems), mining (metal), and skinning (animal hides).
Each skill requires a different tool. Reaping requires a sickle, lumberjacking requires an axe, quarrying requires a hammer, mining requires a pickaxe, and skinning requires a knife. These tools are not weapons, mind you, but harvesting tools only. So that means no matter how nice your dagger is, you still cannot use it to skin that wolf you just killed. This is important because when you go to harvest mode, you automatically switch out your outfit and gear for your harvesting equipment. And vice versa, when you are attacked you will remain in whatever current setup you have until you attack the NPC, at which point you will switch back out for adventuring gear.
As you gain levels in your harvesting abilities, you will pass through different tiers. Before you can progress to the next tier, you must buy a book and right-click it to read it. These books are skill specific and can be bought off of the harvesting trainer. For example, when you reach 85 in mining, you can buy the first book for mining, which will allow you to now harvest tin nodes as well as the basic copper nodes. If you do not purchase and read the book, however, you will not be able to progress past 100 in your particular harvesting skill.
To find a harvesting trainer, merely ask a nearby guard for directions (right-click on guard). The harvesting trainer will put you on a quest line to go cut down some trees or to quarry some rock or whatever. While you are doing that, you may as well mine 60 units of whatever the trainer is asking for, because the next quest is to combine the raw materials together to make 3 refined materials (which 20 raw = 1 refined, so have 60 already and it saves you some running). The last quest he puts you on is to decide your primary and secondary harvesting skills. At this point you will need to refer to the crafting section to decide which path is for you.
CRAFTING
Crafting is the art of turning raw materials into a worked product. These products can be for many different purposes: to turn in to an NPC as part of a work order, to use as equipment, to put up for sale on broker, also they can be used as part of another crafting recipe.
To find a crafting trainer, simply ask a guard again, and they will promptly send you in the correct direction. The trainer will have you do different quests just like the harvesting trainer did, and at the end of the series you will have a pretty good idea what all is involved in the process. The only difference is, with crafting you have to pick the skill first, and then you do the quests. So it is best to be informed up front about what skills do what.
DIPLOMACY
Have you ever wanted to play a character in an online game where you could do wonders just by talking to people and convincing them of different things? Well, Vanguard has that included. Diplomacy is one of the spheres in the game. It is basically like a mini-game from the final fantasy series.
Diplomacy is done by right-clicking on an NPC, and when you see the spot in the dialogue where quests are listed, there will be a special quest of sorts followed by some colorful pictures. This is a diplomatic conversation. Look at the information provided before you click on it though. You will see up to four colorful pictures, if there is less, then that means something very important. The ones shown represent the suits available during that particular conversation. The ones missing represent the suits that are NOT available. This means that if your current strategy is built towards reason, and you engage in a gossip conversation, you will be hard pressed to win because gossip does not allow reason to be used. The easiest conversations to win usually are the interviews since they allow everything, no holds are barred.
The second piece of information listed is a number. That number tells you approximately what level of diplomacy is needed to have a good shot of winning, so if you have only 75 diplomacy, and you are looking at a conversation with a level of 200, you may want to think heavily about looking for someone else to talk to.
After you have determined that your strategy looks good for the battle and that you have at least somewhere near the level needed, go ahead and click on the conversation to begin your diplomatic battle. In the battle you will see three main things: Your Strategy, the Playing Field, and the Dialogue Box. Do not worry so much about the dialogue box during the conversation; you can read that at the end of the battle before you close out of it. The most important parts are the strategy and the playing field. The playing field is divided into two parts: the Opponents side, and Your Side. On your opponents side will be a spot to play the cards, their tallies for each suit, and their half of the meter. There is also a little box above the meter, but that is a bit more complicated than the rest. The other half of the board is your side, and looks pretty much identical with the exception of a few buttons. That meter is what you want to keep at least 1 point in your favor at all times, if you slip and it goes in their favor every once in awhile do not worry too much. Some times it is important to a good strategy to go in debt for a bit to get a major advantage, a gambit if you will. And, some times, it is more advantageous to listen and not play a card, so keep that in mind.
The game is played out like this: You play your first card or you listen, then they play their card or listen, lather rinse repeat. Seems simple, right? Yeah, right. Well, look at each card, it has a simplified version of the playing field on the card, including their half (top) and your half (bottom). If you see positive numbers in their half, then that means by playing that card you will give your opponent points in that suit. Likewise, if there are positive points on your side, you will gain those points. These points are used to play more powerful cards, so be careful how many points you give your opponent in any one suit, unless you know that your opponent does not have anything strong to use those points with. The other part of the card you need to pay attention to is the top-right of the card, there is a spot with a point value listed. This value is the amount that the meter will move: Positive numbers will move it in your favor; Negative number will move it in your opponent’s favor.
There are a few basic strategies that people use, there are definitely more, but these are just some of the beginner strategies.
Rainbow: Have 2 cards that make a good combo, and 1 card of each other suit.
This strategy guarantees two things: That you will have at least one card to play at any given time, and that you most likely do not have anything strong to play. This is a pretty weak strategy, but has its advantages.
Mono-Blast: All cards are same color.
This strategy is the opposite of the rainbow. It has a few openers, and 1 or 2 closers. The only time this is crippled is when you forget to look at the type of conversation before you play.
Sneaky: 3 or 4 cards of your strong suit, and 1 or 2 of your opponent’s strong suit.
This strategy combines some cards of your strong suit, and you play those for a decent amount of time letting your opponent build up your points in a different suit so that you can whack em with your other cards out of the blue.
MISSIVES
As you wander through the lands of Telon, you will do quests everywhere you go, but sometimes all the quests you find are built mainly for groups. Well, sometimes groups are not easy to find, and sometimes you just don’t feel like grouping. For this, Sigil has included something called Missives.
Missives are much like the quests you have been doing all along. They usually include things just like the typical quest, “Kill x/y creatures”. But, usually, you do not have to run back to turn these in, instead they will finish out on their own, and give you a small amount of experience along with a missive scroll.
These missive scrolls can be turned in 1, 5, or 10 at a time. If you only turn in one, you get a paltry item, like food, drink, maybe a small potion. If you turn in five at a time, you get a minor item, either a decent potion, a green named (lesser magic) item, or the like. If you turn in ten, you get good items with a chance for rare items. These range from a lesser magic item (blue) on up to yellow, and possibly orange named items. Of course, sometimes you get really unlucky and get a really nice potion instead.
A good bit of soloing is done using missives along the way.
GRINDING
In the original MMO games, there really was not a great deal of quests worth doing, so people had to find other ways to level up. They found out that they could wander around killing stuff while they did quests and could tell around how much experience they received per creature they killed. After some time, they would reach that lull in quests and progression, so they went back to the places that they had killed in that had really good experience per creature, and they got a group. Sitting there killing the same creatures over and over for hours netted them many levels, and that is what grinding is.
Grinding is necessary at certain points where the game hits a small dip. Either you leveled too fast and the next quests are way above you or too easy for you, or you leveled too slowly so the quests are way too high above you. Maybe there are no quests worth your time at your level. Either way, grinding is your answer to continue leveling.
As you advance through the levels, keep an eye out for enemies that you either like killing, or give good experience. If you need to, come back to them and slaughter them by the dozen.
A form of grinding is farming. Instead of grinding experience though, you are killing mostly, if not purely, for the items and coin. Many people go back to places where the enemies dropped good “loot” (treasure), so that they can rack up a nice hoard of gold, gems, and equipment. This can be a useful tactic if you need to buy upgrades to any of your items or get some of those more expensive skills from your trainer.
BROKERS
A very nice part of this game is the broker system. There are brokers in every major city and in some of the secondary cities as well. Exchange Brokers are a special type of vendor who allows players to put an item up for sale to other players at a designated price. This price can be anything the player chooses to sell his items for, so beware of over-priced goods.
To put an item on the broker, you first must find one. After that, you right-click (double-click or “H” for hail works also) on him to open the broker window. There are two tabs on the window, found at the bottom. One is for purchasing, one is for selling. Before you put an item up for sale, type in the exact name in the search field on the purchasing tab, and hit search. This will bring up a list of every item matching that name, allowing you to sort through and get a feel for pricing info. Also, you can see how many are up for sale. If there are a good many, you may want to sell your item fairly low price for now. If there are only a few, you might be able to squeeze out a little bit more than it is actually worth. But, in every case, make sure that you look at the item and see what you think it is actually worth, because if it is a plate mail breastplate, and you are an arcane caster, you may think that the armor value you see is awesome since you wear robes and cloth armor, but is really not all that great to someone who actually wears plate mail. To prevent this problem, maybe ask a few random plate classes about it first.
Once you have a price in mind, go to the selling tab, drag your item to the box in the upper-left corner, and then look below it at the small boxes for different coins. In those small boxes is where you will type in the price you are asking for the item. After you are done, hit the green button at the bottom to put it up for sale. It will tell you the price it will cost you to do this, and ask for you to accept the price and charges, if you do, then accept, if not, cancel.
Purchasing is a different monster altogether. Since the broker has grave difficulties displaying more than 200 items at any one time, it is a must to know how to search properly. First box will allow you to specify the sphere you are searching for, so if you are looking for a weapon, choose adventuring; if you are looking for some new shoes for your diplomatic outfit, choose diplomacy. The second area allows you to pick a type of item for that sphere. Perhaps you wish to find an offhand dagger for your rogue. In that case, your first area would say Adventuring; the second one would be Adventuring Weapon. The third part defines the slot, so pick secondary hand for the above example. The fourth specifies the class of the character, in this case rogue, so pick rogue. The last slot allows you to pick which rarity of item will be the least shown. If you don’t mind buying a normal mundane item, pick mundane. But most people are looking for good quality. We all know there is strength in magic, and every character needs both strength and magic, so most people pick uncommon (blue names) as their least shown. This should allow you to get a list tailored to your likings just for your character’s needs. Another piece of advice, the headings for each column can be clicked to order the list by that type, so clicking on price a couple of times should sort the list by price from lowest to highest.
TRAVEL
Since Telon is such a massive size, it is important to get a faster mode of travel than “pat ‘n ben” (your feet). There are a few different ways to achieve faster travel, and none of them are without cost.
The fastest method is, of course, to play a bard. Bards have songs they can compose themselves. The components for these songs vary greatly, but they do have speed components that, if mixed properly, allow the bard to run at tremendous speeds. Add in a good drum, and they run even faster. A decent bard can usually outrun even the fastest of mounts.
The next best method is to buy mounts and equipment for the mounts. Mounts at base speed can run anywhere from 30% faster than walking speed to as much as about 90% faster than walking speed. If you buy some tackle and horseshoes, they run a decent amount faster (about 10% - 40%). You can either buy a horse at 10th adventuring level, or 10th crafting level, for 12 silver 50 copper, or you can get one for free by doing the diplomacy quests and getting to a certain point. The diplomacy mount is a bit slower, but it’s free.
There are, for much higher levels, flying mounts available, but not much is known yet about them.
For other means of travel, you can travel intercontinental by using the ports at the big port towns in each continent. Using them will take you fairly instantly to any other major port town.
One other method of travel is to own your own boat. To get one, you either must build it yourself, or pay a decent price to an artificer to build one for you. There are many different styles and sizes of boats, so you will need to inquire about what can be built before you buy one.
Our website have cheap Vanguard gold and Vanguard power leveling. If you are interested in that, go to the related page.
Related article: Vanguard Shores of Darkness KDQ Guide
