Sigil Designer "Tagad"'s Sneak Peek
on Raiding:

By Changul

Yesterday, Sigil Designer "Tagad" answered a lot of questions with regards to Raiding in
Vanguard!



"I'll try to make a post either later tonight or tomorrow regarding
some of the things you'll see in the somewhat near future.



I spent several hours today working with a handful of designers specing
out some of our initial raid targets, their gimmicks and ability sets.



As I've posted in the past, a full on raid interface is a while off. It
will be a while before we are working on full blown raid dungeons as
well.



We are also currently in the process of adding the code support for
persistant respawn timers, as well as the ability to lock down targets
to a specified number of players- who cannot be affected by people
outside of the "raid list" for the NPC. I'll give some more details on
what this means and /why/ we are doing this In the Near Future(TM).



Over the next week or two we will likely have some of these targets
available on the test server. I need to talk to a few more people
before I open it up, but we will be inviting guilds and groups of
players to have buffed characters on the test server for the express
purpose of testing these encounters (they wont be keeping said
characters). Stay tuned in the next few weeks for details on how to
submit your guild or group of friends for this.



Feel free to repost this elsewhere, I'm a bit strapped for time as I
make this post.



Raiding - In the works on the design
side as of today.



Fellowships - Need more testing on
test server. There should be an announcement about these going up.
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Game Breaking Bugs - Still in progress.



It takes having the time to do it correctly, the right people working
on the right things. At this moment in time there are things that are
much higher priority than a raid interface, things that we deem are far
more important to fix.



As for "raiding being the main purpose of MMOs", thats simply not the
approach we have chosen, nor really the "main purpose" of any other MMO
out there. Each offers something different for players, most have a
raiding component, but its not "the component". It may be "the
component" for a percentage of the population, but not everyone.



If these things were all "easy" and "simple" well, they'd be done



What we are working on in regards to
raiding:



Raid Locking - This simply put,
is the ability for us to limit the
number of players that can engage a specified NPC, or affect the
players engaged with the NPC.



Getting this component into the game is very important to us as
developers - we simply do not want to support 40, 50, 60 player raids
at the moment. These are not ruled out for the long term, however it
has been our stance that raids will be targeted primarily around a 24
player limit.



Putting in any true raid content before this was in would put us in a
situation where we would have been "nerfing" raiding later. Frankly,
we've had to tweak and adjust things enough in the game, I'd rather not
have to do so with such a hot button subject.



Will we ever be open to raids larger than 24 players? Its possible in
the future, but as stated, we will continue to move forward with our
target maximum number of 24.



Persistant Respawn Timers -
This is another code feature being added
allowing us to insure that once a target has been defeated he cannot be
respawned unless the specified amount of time has been met. This
persists past server up and server down, through chunk resets and the
occasional crash.



We feel it is also extremely important to have this feature in the game
before offering raid content due to the fact that our "chunks" shut
themselves down after a period of time if no players are near them.
Chunk crashes, while much less common (yes, we know New Targonor is
crashing still!), are also a concern. We simply do not want some of
these targets re-entering the world instantly.



Raid Targets - As I posted
earlier, we are working out the gimmicks and
mechanics for a variety of the "first tier" of raid mobs. I can't get
an exact ETA to getting them in, but they are in the conceptual stages,
and soon we will be breaking down just how long it will take to make
these "concepts" into reality.



Some of the first targets to expect for the first "real" tier include:

Akaran Dwarfsbane, the Tyrant of Dargun's Tomb

Jagund the Wavebreaker

Fengrot Foulbreath

Sultan Rahz Djal, the Lord of Rahz Inkur

(WhatshisfaceIcantspellhisSalamanderName), The World Devourer



We have also talked about several "lesser" raid targets that will allow
up to 24 people to engage, but are going to be tuned for roughly 12
players. These targets will not offer the same quality of loot, but
will allow smaller groups to engage in fights that use similar
mechanics to the 24 man targeted fights.



Loot - Loot isn't something I
can talk a lot about right now. We will be
creating a progression of gear that makes "higher tier" raid targets
more approachable. Be it with better stats, additional click effects,
or permenant effects, we are confident we can make the gear appealing
to players.



It has also long been planned that "ancient dust" be made available
from certain raid targets. This allows some of the highest tier crafted
items in the game to be made.



----



Anyways, thats about as much of a sneak peak as I can provide today. I
hope the information is useful".



Tagad's notes href="http://www.silkyvenom.com/pages/devtracker/"> here

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