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Vanguard: Saga of Heroes Game Overview
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is a high fantasy-themed massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) created by Sigil Games Online, and now developed and run by Sony Online Entertainment
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes Gameplay
As with any MMORPG, Characters in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes are a player's avatar in the game environment. Eight characters can be created on a regular account (12 on Station Access accounts.) At creation, the name, gender, race and adventuring class of the character are chosen and will not be changeable later. The character's appearance is selected as well, however this can be changed later. After his or her creation, the character will begin play in the starting area of his or her chosen race. The character can pick a crafter class and two harvester skills within the game, but is in no way forced to do so.
Adventuring in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes
The Adventuring sphere features the traditional set of MMORPG activities: completing quests and killing mobs. Quest rewards are usually more significant than killing mobs or 'grinding'. Advancement is achieved through obtaining adventuring experience points. Solo and casual advancement is possible, but the quickest progress and best rewards come from group content.
The classes are complex, with an abundance of abilities to learn. To the casual gamer this complexity can be challenging, but it reflects a detailed combat system with some unique aspects. The game designers have attempted to implement an interdependence between classes in a group, with one class able to take advantage of weaknesses inflicted on a target by group members. The ability system is thus highly specific: most abilities are flagged with vulnerabilities inflicted, and those they take advantage of.
Characters have attributes and skills which can be increased with leveling. All classes have reserves or 'pools' of health, endurance and energy which they rely on to survive (save monks and rogues who do not have an energy pool). Health and energy increase with levels and attribute increases, but base endurance is locked at 100 points throughout the game.
The game provides for class customization to some extent. Starting at level 10, characters are rewarded with points which can be spent to increase their attributes. Some classes are given specialist paths at certain levels (usually 15 or 30), which influence the way they play the game by offering them new abilities and encouraging them to alter their equipment and attributes to take advantage of these. There are also 'learned abilities' to be acquired by studying certain mobs, and some from dropped items looted from high-level mobs.
There are currently 15 adventuring classes to choose from
- Protective Fighter (tank, wears heavy armor)
- Warrior (pure melee dps, some group buffs)
- Paladin (some healer abilities)
- Dread Knight (some mage abilities, esp drain health)
- Offensive Fighter (melee damage dealer, wears medium armor)
- Ranger (dual weapon, bows, stealth, some druidic magic)
- Rogue (daggers, stealth, poison)
- Monk (creative class design around "jin", feign death; 3 subclasses)
- Bard (group buffer, crowd control)
- Defensive Spellcaster (healer, armor depending on class, has dungeon teleport)
- Cleric (healing over time, some tanking ability)
- Shaman (natural healer with reactive heals and fast heals, 3 subclasses)
- Disciple (monk healer, able to use endurance to heal instead of energy, feign death)
- Blood Mage (various health management abilities)
- Offensive Spellcaster (magic damage dealer, wears cloth armor, has escape teleport)
- Sorcerer (raw direct damage, invisibility)
- Druid (snares, runspeed, dots, healer abilities)
- Psionicist (mind and crowd control, illusions)
- Necromancer - (pet, dots, feign death)
Probably the most unusual class designs of Vanguard are Monk (as well as the healer variant Disciple), who features a fight system that accumulates a counter called "jin" through various abilities, to open other abilities that use the gained points up again, and the Blood Mage who has a similar system called "blood points" and comes with a large set of abilities to redistribute damage in various ways.
Vanguard's class system is designed for group content. All of the classes can perform one of the three major MMORPG roles: tank, healer, or damage dealer. Tanks and healers are supposed to perform their job about as well as their peers, although in specific situations one class will be better than another. DPS classes vary in their roles: for example the bard, while it belongs to the offensive fighter group, is more of a support class and crowd control specialist than a pure damage dealer.
Solo play is possible, but, as in many MMORPGs, the classes differ in their solo performance. Vital solo abilities - namely to take damage, to heal, and to kite (slow the opponent and run away while attacking from range), or to fear-kite (the same, but fears the opponent periodically again instead of running away) - are distributed very unequally amongst the classes.
The adventuring classes were not initially designed with PvP in mind, and balancing them for this activity has been an ongoing, difficult process which has not as yet been completed. Some powers and abilities work differently in PvP; some do less damage so that weaker classes cannot be killed in one hit by high damage output characters, allowing them to react when attacked.
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Game Time Codes