I've relocated my soloing efforts to this charming little gem, and just thought I'd mention it since it has less press than Vanguard did. I never finished Vanguard, but recently was able to hit the last solo spot (Fallen Cove) and large dungeon (Vault of the Hidden) which essentially completed my tour of all Telon's leveling content. It was not small. I wound up in Istaria firstly, because I just can't get into the newer games much, and also because it's similar to Vanguard. It's older, and I was leery of going into lesser graphics, but, you know what, most of the things they have now with thousands of tiny little details just kind of hurt my eyes, and after looking at this place, the simplicity and the distinct color palette is just a lot more immersive to me. Also, as a UI minimalist, I was able to scour all the text, numbers, and unnecessary things, leaving me with an open field of view and basically the same setup as Vanguard. In 2004 when Istaria launched, Brad was explaining why $30 million MMO's failed. In 2007 when Vanguard launched, people said Istaria would be shut down any day. Well, it is still receiving updates. It's large open world PvE with a huge deal for crafting, although without Vanguard's individual steps and complications. You can play as a human for free, but there are ten more playable races, and twenty-nine classes. It may have some "underground adventure areas", but not really dungeons with names. Being a small old game, there's not much grouping in the leveling range; I've just gotten far enough in it to possibly try that. The thing I like is that it's not faceroll, it's literally challenging. As far as I can tell, it eventually leads to ten person tiered raiding at level 100. It has a slow feel as most of the abilities are on long timers. Even low-level mobs take a while to die, and pulling two is usually fatal. There are no dual-wield classes. Fastest attack is actually a spear. Obviously, if bard, rogue, or mouse action is your thing, you won't like this, but if you looked around and don't see much that matches Vanguard's style, it might be worth a look. Rift is similar, it's just a cottonpuff faceroll thing with too much flashy stuff and lots of headaches, and Asheron's Call is still up, but it does not use tanks. Istaria at least upholds the tanking/healing thing to some extent.
Going to add that it's somewhat intended as a multi-classing game. You can only start as one of the four root classes. To play a Druid for example, you had to get ten or twenty levels as a cleric to unlock it. As you go along, your performance is not choked by endurance, energy, or points like Dreadful Countenance. It totally revolves around your cooldown timers. So with your Druid (which is primarily a healer), to get more dps, you could for example start leveling as a mage. Then when you switch back to druid, some of the mage abilities will migrate over. So in between your heals and limited dps, voila, you've now got some extra fireballs to cast. You can only have one active class at a time, but either way you get to use a few abilities from the inactive class. Obviously if you crank druid to a high level and then go mage, it will be totally nerfed, as for instance you would still have all the high level hit points. Looks more fun to me to gain about five levels, then switch to your support class and catch it up. While multi-classing is not *required*, building some extra skills and abilities for where your main class is weak, appears to be very helpful, as the 20+ death penalty is extremely harsh, if you die more than two or three times, you're pretty much inoperable. It's a little less questy and a little more sandboxy and you have the range of options from throwing your main class into extreme risk or however you'd like to pace a second class, and even though it's old, I'm seeing other new players and a decent amount of low level acxtivity.
