DDO: My Pack (a Preview of the Druid Class)

I don't often post here in character, but I'd though I'd try it as a way of spicing up my low level DDO Druid preview.  You too can have a wolf pack  by the ripe old age of level 2 in DDO if you own the Druid class.  Overall the class is a lot of fun, but I have to say it feels OP at low levels compared to "stock" classes.

This is my pack in the world of Eberron:

The ferocious bitch you see on the right I summon from the Wilderness beyond our plane.  Soldiers and thugs alike tend to underestimate her, until she draws close and they realize she outweighs them by 100 pounds of flesh and a magnitude of ferocity.  She hasn't told me her name yet, but a half dozen times she has died for my causes and more times than I can count she has answered my calls to the Material Plane.  She is always the first among us to snarlingly enjoin our foes, and because of that they often consider her the chief threat until it is too late.

[Game Notes: this is one of the two pets you can summon with Summon Nature's Ally I, which you get for free at level 1.  You can't control summoned pets directly in DDO, their AI is automatically set to aggressive.  The pet is quite powerful in low level content, but you want to replace it as soon as you can cast Summon Nature's Ally II]

Here you can see me in my preferred material form, along with my most loyal friend.  I look similar to my more aggressive packmate, and so foes generally assume her to be our leader.  As impressive as my immortal summoned friend is, to the sorrow of our foes she has but a fraction of my power.  The spirits strengthen me.  I can heal wounds, strengthen allies, and even call fire if need be.  Such is the weave of my hide and the strength of my teeth that none have yet withstood me be they animal or man, shade or demon.  


[Game Notes: a noticeable trend in DDO is that the classes you pay for seem to be getting more and more powerful as they introduce new ones.  Favored Souls are quite powerful, but mainly at higher levels. Monks can be extremely OP from start to finish, but only if you build them well.  Artificers with their strong pets and extreme ranged damage are OP compared to most stock classes unless you go out of your way to gimp one.  Now, Druids seem much the same to me with their powerful pets and shape shifting abilities, not to mention healing, nuking, and buffing as well or better than the other divine casters.]


Surprisingly, much of my power also comes from a sickle given to me by a barkeep in exchange for my services against the cultists of Korthos Island.  When I used the sickle in my natural shape I found it to be a clumsy weapon.  However, when I held onto it while shifting to my wolf form, its true power was revealed.  As long as I continue attack with tooth and claw, pausing only to find new foes when one ceases, it regenerates my skin and muscles.  Sword wounds close the instant they form, arrow shafts are spit on the ground like seeds.  Those that consider the fearsome bitch of our pack to be their primary foe soon learn otherwise.

[Game  Notes: when I finished my third Korthos Island intro quest, I took the scimitar that was obviously added to the rewards list for druids.  It gives you a 15 temporary hit points (a damage shield that works versus any attack to all intents) when you crit that regenerate every time you crit.  In wolf form, you will crit an awful lot I.  I don't think I used any of my "real" hitpoints more than two or three times in all of Korthos Island once I got it.]

As for my most loyal friend with the stylish blue collar, Dusty, I found him in market in southern Khorvaire just before I set out for Xen'Drik and Stormeach. He's not much of a fighter, but I can at least take him into town without fearing that he will kill anyone.   

[Game Notes: a cosmetic pet pre-order bonus]

This brings me to the last member of our pack.  The one that is most often underestimated, and the only one that truly frightens me:

He looks a pup, much like Dusty. But Snowfang is no pup. He is my lifelong companion blessed by the same spirits that grant me my powers.  At present, with his awkward paws and tiny growl, most foes dismiss him.  When he hits their chest with the weight of a cannonball, knocking them down to break bones and sever arteries as his tiny mouth grabs and twists, few live long through their astonishment.  He is but a puppy yet.  What will he grow into?  How angry are the spirits I have chosen to worship?  More importantly, who are they angry with?

[Game Notes: so far this pet seems right on par with the Artificer pet, though not as customizable.  It has a ton of hit points, hits like a truck, and holds aggro well enough for you to get a lot of backstab damage in while using wolf form.  Its only real weakness is that it doesn't have the best defense, I had to heal mine a lot.  Whether this will become an annoyance at higher levels, or for that matter whether it's something you can fix with gear, I can't say.]

Will Players "Get" The Secret World?

Last night I pre-ordered The Secret World from Amazon.  I have early access as well as a some in game goodies like a dog and some sort of XP boost.  Oddly, I am not sure I'll be playing it at all this weekend apart from to logging in to save some character names.  I've been traveling/ entertaining for most of the past week and feel more inclined to catch up in DDO and SWTOR than to jump into something new this weekend.  I'll likely spend more time with TSW over the 4th of July weekend, and I am looking forward to it.

The game really impressed me during the beta weekends (Rowan has a great preview up that summarizes my experience pretty well).  I like the story driven gameplay, the atmosphere and setting, and the classless character development system.  I also think that, much like LoTRO back in the day, a lot of the players that try TSW are not going to "get it."  The game requires real patience to get into.  For example, the quests. Each quest that you take opens up a chain of quests that together form a narrative.  The best way to do quests is to take one quest at a time and see it all the way through to the end. Most of the time when you finish one quest chain, if you explore the area where you end up you will find an object or NPC that will open up another quest chain.

The game is not catered towards completionists.  It's not all that likely that you will even find all the quests the first time you go through a zone, much less do all of them.  I have read estimates that you only need to do 25% of the quests in a given zone to be strong enough to head to the next one (my guess would be more like 50%, but certainly not all of them).  The idea is that each character through a zone will experience a slightly to extremely different set of stories, and to encourage exploration. 

Further, if you pick up a style of quest that you already have (e.g., an investigation quest), it will replace the previous quest of the same style in your quest log, though you can go back later and finish the original quest if you care to [corrected thanks to Rowan!].  In any case, If you try to play TSW like WoW where you pick up every quest in sight and run randomly around the map to quest objectives, you absolutely will be stymied.  On top of that, the puzzle quests can be quite challenging (and are meant to be).  TSW is not a good game for those with MMO ADD.

The combat system and the character development system likewise need a real time investment before they start to shine. The emphasis of the game on narratives is also likely to turn off a lot of players, now that SWTOR has "proved" that compelling scripted narratives have no place in MMOs. This is an absurd contention in my mind, but a lot of commentators do seem to feel that way and have somehow managed to conclude that SWTOR settling at a mere 600-800K or so steady subs (my best guess, 1.3 million subs was the last number released) somehow supports this idea. 

I don't expect TSW to set the MMO world on fire.  However, I do think it will have very strong appeal for players that enjoy exploration, well developed narratives, and are looking for something outside of the fantasy / sci-fi genres.

The Post WoW Commandments of MMO Design (the perspective of a geezer on how WoW changed MMOs for the better)

This post over at Raging Monkeys really got me thinking about how I viewed MMOs pre and post World of Warcraft.  Pre-WoW I had played Everquest briefly (it didn't really suck me in), and played Dark Age of Camelot, Everquest Online Adventures, and Phantasy Star Online (if you want to call the latter a MMO) for longer.  There are those who think WoW ruined the MMO genre by being such a smash hit and appealing to the "lowest common denominator" among MMO players.  I'm not one of them.

WoW certainly had a big effect on the MMO landscape. Even existing MMOs in many cases added in features from it.  For example, DAoC, EQ, and EQ II all added easy ways to identify quest givers after WoW pioneered the "!" system (one of the few design elements in WoW I'm aware of that was not taken from a previous game).  For better or worse, WoW ushered in some new commandments of MMO design:

1. Thou shalt give me something more interesting to do than standing around grinding mobs to level.

Pre-WoW, quests were few and rarely worth doing in most MMOs.  If you did muddle through a poorly designed quest in DAoC or EQ, nine times out of ten you would have gotten better XP and loot by standing in a field killing rats for the same amount of time.  If you really wanted to level at a decent pace, the best way to do it was generally to grab four of your closest friends and stand in one spot killing the same mobs over and over again as they respawned.  I don't know why that seemed like an acceptable state of affairs to me pre-WoW, but it sure as hell doesn't now.

I'm not by any means saying that a MMO has to have a ton of quests, or any quests worth speaking of, to hold my attention these days. Other options include leveling via PvP (see WAR and modern DAOC), Diabloesce randomized dungeons and loot pinatas (see PSO and Dungeon Runners), puzzle based gameplay (see Myst Online: URU, and many of the quests in DDO and The Secret World), or advancement through pure crafting (see EQ II).  But if the only reasonably rewarding activity a game gives me is standing in one spot killing gnolls for six hours, I'm not sticking around past the tutorial.    

2. Thou shalt not hinder my solo play experience, nor shalt thou make whatever random class I pick a sucktastic soloer without giving me some kind of warning on the character generation screen. 

Apart from PSO, WoW was the first MMO I played where any class could solo well.  Sure, some classes are monsters at solo play while others are merely OK at it.  But the fact remains you can pick any class you like on the character selection screen and have a pretty fun time, whether you decide to play solo or spend a lot of time in groups.  That's generally true of most MMOs these days.

Contrast with olden MMOs like EQ or DAoC where the majority of classes could barely solo at all past very low levels.  "What the best solo class?" was a really common forum topic, since a wrong choice on the character select screen meant that on any given night you logged you would have to stand around twiddling your thumbs until you could get a group together.

I enjoy playing with other humans, but I don't like being forced to.  A game with forced grouping is one where you may was well not log in at all if you can't invest a few hours, and one where you are forced to be social whether you feel like it or not.  The latter does not suit my temperament (and really never has), while the former doesn't fit my play schedule at all any more.

3. Thou shalt give me stuff more interesting to do in combat then watch as my auto-attacks slowly whittle down my opponent's health.  Yes, even at low levels!

Even before WoW, it used to drive me buggy that at low levels on most melee classes all you did was hit auto-attack and then stand there like a drooling moron watching numbers creep across your combat log.  Even at higher levels, it was often much the same save that you'd whip out a special ability once or twice a combat.  DAoC improved things a good bit by adding melee attack chains and positional attacks to use while you slowly whittled down an opponent's health.  However, WoW was probably the first "true MMO" (I'm excluding PSO here) I played where every combat felt fast paced and dynamic.

More modern MMOs have only taken this feeling to greater extremes.  For example, there's nothing quite like flying through the air in Champions Online while raining down fireballs on the heads of your foes (cackling madly at their impotence).  Allod's Online, DDO, SWTOR, and others have even gone so far as to dispense with auto-attacks altogether.  Thankfully, the days of hitting auto-attack and then going off to make a sandwich are long behind us.

4. Thou shalt not design a MMO with graphics so poorly optimized that it's going to run and look like a turd on any PC I could reasonably be expected to own.

I was able to run many old school MMOs when they came out.   But that always involved systems that were pretty well on the edge of my budget.  At a time when I had been stringing along an older system so long that I couldn't run many current games at all, WoW looked and ran great on my aging PC.  Around the same time, EQ II had far inferior art direction and was barely playable on my rig.  That really cemented the idea in my head that there is simply no excuse for a MMO developer to release a game that demands cutting edge hardware to run well. With good art direction even relatively simple graphics can be immersive.

Since then, developers seem to have largely caught on to this.  My three year old $700 gaming rig runs SWTOR and The Secret World just fine. Not at maxed settings by any means, but good enough to look pretty.  For example, any screenshots you see of SWTOR on this blog are on my normal play settings.    The last MMO to really screw this up, Tabula Rasa, I believe would likely still be around if more than 20% of the players that tried it didn't have to run it on minimum settings (where it was foggy and fugly).  If a $300 gaming console can pump out astounding graphics in hi def, my PC that costs twice as much and has more than double the hardware specs sure as hell should be able to.  If it can't, your engine sucks.

Wrap-up

I would count myself among those that believes WoW improved the MMO genre by making it more accessible.  I wouldn't automatically dismiss a MMO that breaks one of the new commandments.  But any two of them?  Yeah forget it, whatever game you are designing is not aimed at me.

Played Lately: DDO, Gianthold

DDO has been one of my mainstay MMOs for a good long while now.  I'm in a smallish guild there that I quite enjoy, and I log in one or two evenings a week to adventure with a fixed group.  Our characters are now on the cusp of level 15, much further than I've made it before in DDO.  Lately, we have been working our way through the Ruins of Gianthold adventure pack.

Gianthold contains a small village/ quest hub that has a suprisingly full suite of ammenities.  It has auction house access, a bank, and most of the vendors you could want including one that sells hireling contracts.  Obviously, it also has giants:

 The giants DDO are scaled pretty accurately to what I recall from the pen and paper rules, which is to say massive.  Here is my dark elf favored soul standing next to a cloud giant.

The giants hand out quests primarily to kill giants and their minions.  Stone giants, fire giants, cloud giants, and even skeletal undead giants all make appearances (you spend a lot of time stabbing giants in their calves).  The visual design of the giants I've seen so far hew pretty closely to the way they were envisioned in the original AD&D monster manual.  It's been a treat to see the illustrations I remember from my teenage years come to life.

 Yeah that's pretty much as bald and scary as I expected stone giants to be based on the PnP illustrations.

The quest rewards haven't really been blowing my mind.  Of course due to time spent farming items with nice set bonuses in a lower level area, as well as the labors of a guild crafter, my character is quite well geared for a level 14.  It's not really surprising the area holds few upgrades for me.  The XP rewards, at least, are very nice.  By the time we leave I expect to be at least close to level 16.  Visually, the area is also really interesting.

In general, the further along you get in DDO the more interesting the environments get.

For a really old game that runs well on meager PCs, DDO still looks quite good in my opinion.  I also find the real time combat to be a nice change of pace from almost every other MMO I play.  I find the depth of the character generation system in equal parts frustrating and entertaining.  When a build comes together and works for what you designed it to do, it's exhilarating.  When a build fails and you realize you have spent days leveling a gimp, it's not as exhilarating (to put it nicely).

     Gianthold was apparently once the site of a war between giants and dragons.  How both sides got crystallized I'm a little fuzzy on, but it makes for some impressive sights.

Apart from DDO I'm still playing SWTOR nearly every night.  Unless I am mistaken, character transfers will go live tomorrow night.  It would certainly be nice to be able to move some of my abandoned characters on other servers to my current home, but I'm not sure they will qualify since they are all on slightly different server types to the one I'm currently playing.  Regardless, I'm still having fun there and plan to see the two Imperial class quest storylines I'm now on through to the end.  From there, the Republic awaits... and of course Secret World and GW 2 at some point as well. My interests over the summer look to greatly outstrip my spare time.  

I leave you with another set of crystallized figures, this time on an island surrounded by lava.  This really belongs on a heavy metal album cover.

NBI: Winding Down...Final Thoughts

The newbie blogger initiative is coming to a close, Syp has a list of all the new blogs and advice posts up over at Biobreak.   This month has been a heck of a lot of fun for me not only due to meeting so many new bloggers, but also because I stumbled across some established bloggers I really like that I somehow managed to miss all this time.  My blog roll changed more in the past month than in the previous two years.  I think we all owe Syp a dept of gratitude for organizing an event that has been injected some new life into our corner of the blogoverse.  Good on you Syp! 

I never did get around to my advice post, mainly because I was out of town most of the month.  However, it was also hard to say what I would have added in terms of general advice given all the great posts  that other bloggers put out.  Some of my favorites were Anjin's general advice on how to get pageviews (Sente has another good general advice post, along with Blue Kae), Tesh's poignant piece on blogging as a social activity, Rowan's duo on the mechanical aspects of setting up blogger (I actually tweaked my settings after reading both of those), and the part of MMOgamerchick's post where she explains why she usually answers all of her comments (I couldn't agree more). 

During the course of the month, I spent some time thinking about what, if anything., I consider to be the golden rule of blogging.  I think it would be something along the lines of "Write about your passion."  Write what you'd like to read, what you want to say, and what you feel needs to be said.  Blogging is a labor of love more than anything. Very few of us are ever going to reach the popularity of Tobold, and even the Tobold's by and large aren't making any money blogging.  The only reason in the world to blog is because you have something that you want to express, and thoughts and experiences you want to preserve.

For me this blog is one part diary, one part personal soapbox. Of course like all bloggers I want to be read, or else these posts would be unpublished Word documents on a random desktop.  But I'd say creating something you are happy with and that expresses your voice is probably the single most important goal to have as a blogger.  Whether your blog attracts a small audience or a huge audience, if years from now you can look back on certain posts and think "I made that, I'm happy with it and I'm glad it's out there on the web" I'd say you have succeeded.

The Love In is on a Haitus

You may have noticed that my previous, somewhat dry, post has been the only thing to read around here for a good while now.  I'm currently traveling and have access to neither MMOs nor much opportunity to post.  Expect posting to resume near the end of the month.  In the meantime, may your adventures be thrilling and your looting be fruitful :-)

This brief update brought to you by insomnia.

On the use of in game mail as a post-it-note

Wednesday night I logged into Star Wars the Old Republic after an absence of a nearly a week.  Looking at my quest log, it looked like I needed to head to Nar Shadda and start in there.  I noticed I had a couple of mails, and I vaguely remembered mailing a note to myself the week before.  I decided to check it before I headed out, this is how my message from me to me read:

Title: Memento 


First, head to fleet and spend all ur balmorra commendations. You have an OJ weapon that should make what u have look stupid if u max it out.  Then head to nar shadda for more leveling quests.

You will need to level ur biochem into the 100s b4 level 25 (but I suspect u'll remember that).

 It actually turned out to be a big help, I had completely forgotten I was sitting on a huge ass pile of Balmorra commendations.  Thirty minutes later, I headed to Nar Shadda with vastly upgraded gear.

Now, I find myself wondering...why the hell didn't I think to do this sooner?  The two biggest hurdles I always face when returning to a MMO I haven't played for a while are (1) I have no idea what I was working on, and (2) I can't remember my basic attack combos on whatever characters I used to play.  Yet in nearly all of these games, you can send yourself mail and it will sit there waiting for you until you open it.   

For example, I now really wish the last time I quit WoW I had sent myself something like this note on my Warlock:

Memento:


(1) Normal weak foe: 1,3,4
(2) Strong foe: 1, 2, shadow nookie (bar 2), 4
(3) panic buttons: wall of shadow (right bar, lower part), shadow selfhealgasm (just above wall of shadow)
(4) Crowd control: shadow giggles (bar two, far right)

Whenever Mist of Pandaria launches (I expect play it for a month or two and quit when I hit the new level cap, like every WoW expansion) I will undoubtedly fire up my Warlock and get smacked in the face by a wall of hotbars linked to abilities that I barely remember.  If only it had occurred to me to mail myself cliff notes before I quit playing last year, the transition back could be so much smoother.

Further, I tend to dabble in a lot of FtP MMOs.  When I go back after a long absence, I generally haven't got the foggiest clue where to start.  In some cases it's so bad that it's easier for me to just abandon my old mid-level characters and start over fresh.  The last time I played Allod's Online that's exactly what happened.  I had a level 22 Summoner, and found her so confusing that I ditched her and started over on a Paladin.  If only I had sent myself a few notes before I quite the first time, I might have actually been able to see some of the higher level areas the month or so I was playing.

I now actually feel a bit dumb that it never occurred to me to use in game mail as a post-it-note.  Am I the only one that hasn't been doing this?