DDO Journal - 4-December-2006

These are the adventures of my cleric Tobold on the European server Lyrandar in Dungeons & Dragons Online - Stormreach. I just started this character end of last week, and over the weekend I got him to the second rank of level 3. As DDO only has 12 levels, with 5 ranks each, one rank basically corresponds to one level in other games. So in WoW terms I'm level 12 now.

Well, at least at the start the ranks felt like levelling, because each rank gives you one action point, which you can spend on buying an enhancement. But by the time I reached level 2 I reached the enhancement cap: You can only have 4 enhancements. By going up a real level you get the choice of better enhancements, and the first one or two ranks of each level you spend upgrading your old enhancements with better ones. But by the end of level 2 I didn't use two of the action points I had, because there were no better enhancements than those I had, and the action points were basically useless.

Most of the time I spent soloing. One big change that DDO introduced since I played the beta is that every quest now has a "solo" difficulty. Previously most quests couldn't be soloed, now nearly all of them can, at least those I encountered up to level 3. Still joining a group is very interesting, because xp aren't split. You get the same xp for a quest whether you do it alone, with a few other players, or in a full group. And with a group it's obviously easier, so you can choose a higher difficulty level for the same quest and get even more xp. So besides soloing I also did some speed quest farming in a group on elite difficulty.

Playing a cleric in DDO is nice, because I run around in plate armor and do decent damage with a heavy mace, but still have all the advantages of a healer. Which includes getting lots of invites to groups. Less pleasant is that I also get some random invites without people even talking to me, I just get hit with a group invitation window. I don't always accept those. Once I accepted a random invite, the group leader (a wizard) asked me whether I had "dv", I didn't even know what that was, and I got immediately kicked out of the group. Meanwhile I found that "dv" is divine versatility, where you can use one of your turn undead attempts to have some other group member gain some small amount of mana. Too bad that doesn't work on myself. But I took that enhancement now, and chose feats and abilities that make me have 11 turn undeads per quest. So even if there are no undeads, at least I can pump the other spellcasters in the group full of mana.

At the end of the weekend I had done nearly all the quests in the harbor area, except the few which are higher than level 3 or can't be soloed. So I moved on to the market area, unsure whether I would find quests low enough for my level there. But that doesn't seem to be a problem, I even found level 2 quests in that area. What is a bit annoying is that many quests lead you into the sewers. And while every quest is different, with a different map, different traps and switches, and different objectives, the tile set is often the same. And there isn't much variety in monsters either, more than half of all the mobs I killed up to now were kobolds, and I've only seen a dozen or so different monster types.

I do like the DDO quests, which have a lot more variety than WoW quests. There are puzzles to solve, levers to pull, traps to avoid, scripted events, and a lot of other minor features like that, which make quests more interesting than simply killing X kobolds. But DDO doesn't have the same degree of polish that WoW has. The pixel count of the graphics may be higher, but the result looks more bland. Of course the more colorful, cartoony look of WoW is not everybody's favorite, but I prefer it to the not-quite-photorealistic look of DDO or EQ2.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:14 AM Permanent Link