Saga of Heroes (who have a really hard time looting corpses)

I canceled my Age of Conan account and reopened my Vanguard account last week. I played Vanguard at release and it was pretty much unplayable due to all the bugs and instability. But 18 months has passed and the game has come a long way.

Tons of content and quests, so many places to explore, beautiful scenery and amazing music. The game still crashes occasionally, but it is fairly quick to log back in, unlike Age of Conan, where you had to sit through about 5 minutes of file scanning, loading, intro videos, more loading, and even more loading.

But one thing that boggles my mind is that they haven't fixed the buggy looting yet. I would think that loot is one of the most important things to fix in an MMO, and yet it is SO painfully annoying to manage group looting that I have been shying away from grouping with guildies and running solo instead. Fortunately, there are workarounds for most of the bugs now, but it is still annoying.

Here are some of the problems:

1. HOLD HANDS WITH YOUR GROUP LEADER

If a mob drops a rare and your group leader is out of range, you are unable to loot it and unable to start the roll until the group leader comes into range. The workaround for this is to ask the group leader to pass leadership to you, start the roll and then pass leadership back. But what if your group leader is AFK? Have you ever watched a gear upgrade despawn right in front of you, and been unable to do anything about it? Not fun.

2. HARVESTERS BEWARE

If a group member kills a mob while you are harvesting a node, you are either interrupted and have to start over again, or your harvesting ends early, resulting in a smaller yield. Also, if your harvesting node yields a rare and the group leader is out of range, see #1 above. Very annoying for harvesters. I harvested my first ultra-rare yesterday, and the group leader was out of range and I couldn't loot it. Fortunately, he was sitting right beside me IRL so he passed me leader and all was well. But not everyone has the luxury of having their very cute and sexy group leader sitting next to them.


3. TOO MUCH LOOT, NOT ENOUGH ROLLING

If two rares drop at the same time, you can only have one roll window up. So you have to wait for everyone to roll on the first item before you can start the roll on the second item. Not too bad right?

Wrong.

Here's why: Sometimes the roll window is buggy and doesn't appear. When this happens, the first roll never gets marked as complete, and no one in the party is able to start rolls on anything else.

Fortunately, there is a workaround for this: The group leader types /groupc, which manually ends the roll. However in a fast moving group where the leader isn't on Vent or isn't keeping a close eye on group chat, you can miss out on quite a bit of loot before the situation gets straightened out. And if the group leader walks out of range of the mob with loot, you then have issue #1 to deal with as well.

4.I'M NOT GREEDY, I'M NEEDY

Sometimes only the "Greed" button is available during the roll, even if the item is equippable by you and is an obvious upgrade. So if it is BOP, and you need it, you have no choice but to greed. If someone else doesn't need it, rolls greed and wins, you are screwed. No real workaround for this that I have figured out yet...

Taking all these looting issues into account, I am still having FAR more fun playing Vanguard than I had in Age of Conan. Age of Conan didn't really have too many looting issues - but that might be because 99% of the loot was crap and no one wanted it anyway. But that's a topic for another day...