Pumping Irony

In a surprise move, SOE unleashed Vanguard’s GU6, “Heroes Reborn” today rather than next week. I’m already patched up and ready to go but the World Servers are still offline for another 40 minutes.

The GU6 Patch Notes are up already, and they’re a doozy so crack open the laptop, connect to the WiFi and enjoy a spinach & bacon baked egg soufflé because you’ll need some nourishment while perusing SOE’s latest novelette. Keep in mind the patch notes are only the documented changes; I’ve seen “2500+ bug fixes” being bandied about and at a glance I don’t think these patch notes reflect them all.

I was playing last night and someone asked when GU6 was arriving and someone said “tomorrow!” but I thought it was just some leg-pulling. Bzzt! Wrong answer. Unfortunately, I did not manage to get a good screenshot of Dolndruth sans armor yesterday. I tried but was in the middle of questing without enough free inventory slots to remove his armor and underclothes during Telon’s half-hour of daylight. (Seriously, why is it always night? It seems like day lasts 30 minutes and night lasts 3 hours!) I did snap a few awesome-looking screenshots with armor on in the forested hills of Thestra only to discover that for some reason the game’s screenshot ability isn’t working and I’d forgotten to load up Fraps… /sigh

Of the myriad fixes, here are the ones that interest or affect me:

• Isle of Dawn! The Vanguard trial has finally arrived! It sounds like new characters will begin their lives on the Isle of Dawn which will allow them to reach up to level 10. Subscribers can continue on to one of the mainland continents. Characters do not incur death penalty until level 11 now, up from the previous 10 so that no DP occurs on the Isle of Dawn. Additionally, this is where the bulk of the performance increases should occur, as SOE has been saying the Isle would be build completely from the new art assets, which have not yet made it fully to the main game world. I haven’t been following Vanguard’s development, so it’s entirely possible this is no longer the case, but last time I’d checked in with the game and with the Voyages of Vanguard podcast that was still supposed to be the plan.
• Character Model Revamp. All new models that should not only look more heroic but also increase performance, especially when grouped. Now, I totally enjoyed Dolndruth’s look but as for practically every other race, they were downright silly-looking. My performance is pretty good when soloing but took a very noticeable hit while grouping so these new models are very important to me — Dolndruth is a tank, after all, and tanks need groups to, you know… tank for. GU5 removed the majority of facial customizations for that phase of character model and performance improvements, and GU6 is re-including many of them which have undergone extensive optimization to increase the game’s performance while still providing a capacity to have your characters look the way you want them.
• Players now have an additional four character slots. Wow! I’ll admit, Vanguard never struck me as the type of game I’d want an alt due to the slow leveling and other factors, but I also never intended Vanguard as my primary game. For those who do, this is excellent news!
• The patcher will now patch down pre-compiled shaders. The client will no longer attempt to compile your shaders at start up. Thank you!
• Memory Leak fixes! Two specific memory leaks were addressed as well as general memory leaks. Thank you!
• The majority of objects will now fade in when they become viewable instead of popping in. Holy crap, did someone at SOE actually read a suggestion of mine? Thank you!
• Fixed an issue where players could fall to their deaths when crossing a chunk line. Ugh, thank you again!
• Shadow Step: You can now open combat with this ability. Cool! I love Shadow Step, though I ended up creating two macros for it: one to cast Harrow for the “Boo! I suck out your soul!” effect (ie. life drain), the other to cast Phantasmal Blade for a teleport stun. I’ll have to see how, or if, this change will affect my macro usage with Shadow Step.
• Dread Knight changes. The DK only saw four skills having minor tweaks, none of which Dolndruth has yet so I have no opinion here. Only the rogue class saw less love than the DK, however, with a whopping one tweak to the class. What GU6 did not address is the 2-handed crit bug and Dreadful Countenance still not working as intended. GU6 has adjusted the dps for all classes and the dps for DK’s is to compensate for the 2H crit, which will be addressed sometime later. No word whatsoever on when DC will ever be looked at, though, which is a shame since it’s supposed to be one of the DK’s defining abilities.

I’ll give GU6 a go in awhile after I’ve run some errands, walked a few miles before the storms arrive, and SOE gets the World Servers online. Oh, speaking of which… it’s 2008, is it really that difficult to actually poll the servers to see if they’re online rather than just putting up a static “All servers are up” line on the launcher which is a lie? C’mon guys…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Vanguard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.