Weekly Newsletter 04_08_08: Going Out With Pizzazz

Tags: in

Updated Fri, Jan 02, 2009 by Dalmarus

Going Out With Pizzazz

April 7th, 2008 - By Dalmarus

Greetings and salutations! It's with deep regret I inform you that this will be the last "Weekly Newsletter" you'll be seeing from me. It has been brought to my attention that such a humble title has no place in the upper echelons of great literature dedicated to espousing the virtues of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Since "great literature" was not something I ever considered my newsletters to be, I thought the original name was appropriate.

Alas, you still haven't gotten rid of me so forget those dreams of sending gargantuan mounds of "thank you" letters to the Ten Ton Hammer management for now. You could focus that enthusiastic energy towards another equally rewarding goal though... creating the new name for our weekly newsletters. The way I see, you have two choices. You can either come up with an appropriately humorous name for the newsletter yourself and send me your idea, or you can pray to what ever you find holy in this world that the gods give me a newsletter name in a vision of wisdom. The alternative is ending up having a title like "The Telon Telegraph", "Verbose Vanguardians", or something equally horrific thrust upon you. The choice is yours!

While out running through the land of Telon the other day, I realized it had been quite some time since I regaled you with tales of my heroic adventures within the game. Despite the continual insistence of a good friend, I do not "hunt like a spaz", thank you very much. Just for the sake of argument, assuming for a moment that I was indeed willing to concede the truth of his words, I still believe I do nothing more than keep things interesting. Other friends or players may however refer to these times of interest as "getting me killed". Pay them no mind.

A couple of weeks ago, I'm ashamed to admit that one particular group of poor souls had to endure this method of hunting while we were in Trickster's Haven. I may have mentioned a few times that I've been spending an inordinate amount of time hunting in there (direct translation? "Constantly!"). As such, I'm quite comfortable with my knowledge of mob placement and movement patterns within the dungeon. What I apparently was not comfortable with though, was my recently rearranged buttons on my hotbars.

It had taken some time to get the group together, but soon, we were off and running. A few of the group members had never completed the Excavation Preparation quest (which is really the quest that kicks off all the exciting stuff in Trickster's Haven), so we decided to run through the quest for them, killing everything in our path along the way. While it may seem a bit daunting at first, just follow my handy map, and you shouldn't have any problems finding your way around.

For one part of the quest, you need to locate the Pit of the Creeper. In and of itself, this really isn't that big of a deal. It's not even a big deal if someone gets a little too far into the room and aggroes a single mob. Remember how I mentioned I had recently rearranged my hotbar a little earlier? If you accidentally hit your Fear button in that room, that is a big deal.

Fearing anything in a dungeon isn't normally one of the brightest ideas in the first place, but I can't think of a worse room to have pulled that impressive trick off in. Off the top of my head, I can't even tell you how many level 42+ 4-dot undead mobs there are in that room. It has to be at least 10 though. That's right... in my attempt to help my fellow players begin a series of adventures within the depths of Trickster's Haven, I managed to get them all slaughtered within a matter of minutes. That's no easy feat if I do say so myself. Well, maybe it is, but you get my point.

Now despite the laughter (or groans) I know everyone is releasing right now, I know I'm not the only person that has accidentally managed to slaughter their playing group in a spectacular fashion, so it's only fair that you share some your more memorable incidents.

Tell us your tale!