Over the weekend, on a whim, I rolled up a wood elf rogue on Woefeather just as something to do. I had no real intention of actually doing anything with her, I was just more curious to see what life was like elsewhere. I was pleasantly surprised at the difference between both the content of the continent as well as the server. Thus Lunestra was born.
It was interesting to see how things were a little more directed and polished when starting in Kojan. A few newbie quests were more involved, and there was actually descriptive text that appeared on screen. The lore was a little more solid as well, and as you did quests you began to understand the region and history, and were naturally directed forward both in the story and in your location. This seems to be in contrast to Qalia, where you basically were charged with repeated slaughtering of ksaravi just because. Also, the community on Woefeather seemed to be a little more chatty than on Targonar. This may be due in part to Targonar being an unofficial Oceanic server, so their prime time is 16 ahead.
So far, it is also a nice change to play a damage dealer after a year+ of spending all my time healing in WoW. It gives a neat little rush when you see big damage numbers scroll on the screen, and you watch the critter's health drop a big chunk.
Also, towards the end of last week (actually a week ago now), I got all new hardware for my machine. Seeing that it had been around 2 years since my last upgrade, I didn't feel too bad dropping $850 on a new motherboard, cpu, memory and video card. I ended up with:
All in all, I'm pretty satisfied. When I'm out tooling around in the countryside by myself or with a few other people, I can run Vanguard on the highest quality settings and get around 30FPS. I did notice that when I ran my first dungeon, I did have to tone it back to balanced to get acceptable framerates (~mid 20s). If I left it at highest quality, I was around 12fps. That I can deal with that. Switching out hardware also cleared up all the whackiness that I talked about earlier with graphical glitches. I'm pretty sure this was related to issues with the onboard sound of my old motherboard.
One thing that was pretty apparent is how much more enjoyable and immersed the game is for me. I am not being bothered by the interface and the problems, I can focus entirely on the in-game experience.
