A final post here, as I’ve killed Dracula and have a huge backlog of games. A point of issue in a prior post is the need to farm material in order to craft things that aid in progression. In a multiplayer game, many people make short work of any farming route and it’s pretty easy to split the work. As a solo player, there are some rather substantial farming bottlenecks. As Azuriel pointed out, this hits hard at the Power Core unlock.

To counter this, V Rising has a servant & mission system, where you can send them out to collect material for you.

Servants have multiple factors, where they are collected, their blood type, and their blood quality. Their location matters, as it improves the amount of material collected from the same location. Their blood type matters, as it reduces the difficulty by 100 of a given battle type (monsters, battles, etc). The blood quality has a minor impact as it impacts their power level, but as long as you have 70% you’re fine. Keep the 100% blood for merlots.

Each servant must be equipped, and the gear level has a flat *10 applied. 45 gear level = 450 power. Add blood quality (at most 30) and there’s your score. This score matters based on the area you are sending the servant. You can select various durations which increase the odds of success but give diminishing returns. 3 sets of 4 hours give much more than a single 12 hour run, but they will be harder to do.

The challenge here is that you need to MAKE the equipment, and at the end game, you’ll need a some rather strong armor/weapons to max out the locations. Most locations can take 2 servants, though some are 1 to 3. So even if you did max it out, you’re likely only going to get 30-60 of any particularly meaningful foray. In nearly all cases, this is the equivalent of you personally farming for 10 minutes. In practical terms, this means that while a clan may send out multiple servants, a solo player is unlikely to find much value. It is not helpful for progression, but I can absolutely see it being helpful for repairing in PvP battles.

Once exception. At ~75 gear level if you capture an 80% draculan servant, they can do a mission on the far east of the map to collect a few hundred Greater Stygian Shards. Now, a single rift run should give you about 1500, but this allows you to supplement with not much hassle.

I do think it’s an interesting system, as it can’t be too rewarding or people wouldn’t go out of their castles. Finding the appropriate balance here is hard. My only true gripe would be that if you dramatically overpower a location that you get more materials as a result. What you get instead is shorter missions and therefore more rewards, but that means more logging in to collect them. Maybe allow a queuing option?

There are many cool ideas in V Rising, and almost all of them work. Clearly it is designed for group play and PvP at the end game, every system funnels into that concept. But that there’s a decent PvE game here too, wow. I really wasn’t expecting this and am beyond surprised.