The Mystery of a Nameless Prisoner (DDO)

One of the things I really enjoy about MMOs, and games in general, is neat background details you can sometimes find.  Dungeons and Dragons Online has a lot of them, especially in older content.  Here is one of my favorites.

If you are working on the Tangleroot Gorge quest line,  it has a bit of a Groundhog Day feel to it.  You end up going into the same dungeon six or more times, with a slightly different objective on each run.  For example your first time in you are just scouting and killing a few hobgoblins, the second time in you are freeing prisoners.  However, much of the layout, trap and mob placement is identical on each run.

A lot of players find the quest chain annoyingly repetitive.  However, one advantage to the strange setup is that the quests can give you a sense of events progressing over time as you enter and re-enter the dungeon.  One of the designers took advantage of this to add in a neat little side story that unfolds over successive runs, but only if you take time to clear out an optional area on every run.

The second time you enter the dungeon, you are rescuing prisoners.  However there is an optional area where you can fight some scorpions:

After you kill them, if your strength (or that of one of your hirelings) is high enough you can go through the double doors at the back. There you find this bedraggled NPC:

At first he is raving about invisible bugs that are attack him, but when you start speaking to him he calms down.  He relates that he tried to escape, but got stung by the scorpions in the process.  He is now dying from the venom, and it's too late for you to help him.  As he starts to fade, he relates something ominous:

"Hiding down here in the dark, I started listening .  .  . listening to the stones.  It sounds like I'm mad from the venom.  Maybe I am.  But I've heard a voice.  Something lives down here . . . besides the hobgoblins.  Something old and angry.  It lives in a watery cave, and it hates.  Such hate in that voice . . . I am glad I will never meet its owner."

He then drops to the floor, dead.

After that there is a treasure chest nearby, and you go on with your adventure.  However if you go to the same optional spot and beat up the scorpions again, you find a single zombie in the area where where you talked to the NPC:

The next time through, if you go to the area for a fourth time, you find a single skeleton:

 

And if you go by one final time, you find only an inanimate skeleton on the floor:

Apparently his body  is now too forgone even for whatever dark magic animated his corpse before to revive him.  At last he is is at peace.   

Much later in the quest chain, in yet another optional side area, you can find out what he was talking about.  After killing the boss in the second to last quest of the chain, he drops a key and  this book:

When you pick up the book, the in-game narrator intones: "Zulkash's notes speak about trying to control an elemental in a water filled cavern."

Back near the entrance to the dungeon, if you are the type of player that explores the quest areas really thoroughly,  you may have noticed a grate underwater that you couldn't open .  

With the key from the boss, you can now open the grate, which leads to a long underwater passage.  

If you have water breathing, a decent swim skill, or are a living golem and don't need to breath like my character, you can swim to the end of the passage.  It opens up into a large cavern, in the back of which is an island with three stone elementals. Zulkash has apparently been trying to take control of them using magic with little success:

When you kill the elementals you get a bit of XP and an extra treasure chest.  Not hugely rewarding, but it's an interesting side story that you have to put in some work to see.  I love little details like these that game designers sometimes put in for us to find.  You can tell that they are real labors of love.  

The Hardcore server in DDO: It's a lot of fun but also slightly pay-to-win

I have been playing the hardcore server in DDO all weekend.  It's been great fun, and it's neat seeing tons of players running around the starter areas.  I have been having a blast feeling like a newb again.  No guild buffs, no years of gear banked or crafting bot to fill it out.  The first time I found a decent heavy crossbow I was ecstatic, I had been using a plain unenchanted crossbow from a vendor in the harbor to that point.  Resist energy wands have also become a precious possession, I won't even try to play up a character that can't either cast the spell or use the wands.  So far I have made it nearly to seven on my main, and I have several alts.

Oddly no deaths yet.  However, I came really close on my main last night. I've been playing DDO for so long I tend to think I can do anything on Normal difficulty with next to zero risk.   I was running Irestone Inlet completely solo last night, not even a pet or hireling.  The way the quest is set up you will get unexpectedly jumped by roving packs of mobs.  I got a pack of adds while I was already in the middle of fighting a camp of six or ten hobgoblins and kobolds, and it was getting a bit hairy.  However, I wasn't worried.  I had plenty of instant cast self heals up, and I was mowing everyone down quickly with a slightly OP ranged build.

Then suddenly I couldn't attack or even heal myself, and six or seven guys were still beating on me.   My health bar started plummeting and I ran for my life while trying to figure out what the hell was wrong.  An icon said I was burdened, so I started frantically dropping suits of armor onto the sand to try and lighten my load. Then it hit me: the Hobgoblin Shamans I was fighting sometimes use Ray of Enfeeblement.  My character only has eight strength. Not normally a problem, but when any of your stats get reduced to zero in DDO you become "helpless" and you can't so much as drink a potion.

I lurched through some bushes while getting pelted with arrows and spears, frantically mashing the useless hotbar keys  for my various healing abilities.  I was way too far from any safe spot, I was certain I was going to die and lose everything. Finally, when I was down to ten health a combination of poor mob pathing and sheer dumb luck saved me. The enfeeblement spell wore off just in time and I was just barely able to pull things out.   It was such a close call that I immediately dropped the quest and went directly to an auction house to find something with a strength enchantment on it.  My build had a critical weakness I had never even considered.  It was a harrowing but thrilling experience.

 But is it pay-to-win?

All in all I am having a blast on the hardcore server, but there is one thing about it that bothers me a bit. Part of the idea behind the server is a fresh start and an even playing field.  However, the field is not really all that even.  If you own 32 point builds, all the classes and all the enhancement trees like I do it's a pretty big advantage.  Perhaps the most egregious example of this is the Inquisitive Enhancement Tree.

The Inquisitive tree is arguably the single strongest ranged enhancement tree in the game right now.  To the point that some  players are arguing that it's completely overpowered in the current meta.  It also starts strong out of the gate.  For example with the right build you can be dual wielding crossbows and getting an extra 3d8 law damage to every attack that lands by the ripe old age of level 2.  This damage stacks with damage from every other source, so your old OP crossbow build is now "OP plus 3d8" if you go this route.

Currently the only way to realistically get access to this tree at low levels is to spring for the $80 Sharn package, the cheapest one that comes with it.  You can in theory grind out access to it for one character with Sharn City Council favor if you have the $40 package, but it would be nearly impossible to do the quests that grant favor with this faction until the high teens.  Even if you did that, the moment you die the character that has unlocked the tree gets banished from the server.

I don't think Inquisitive is really the "I win" button that some players are making it out to be.  However it's undeniably strong, and I am seeing an absolute ton of players dual wielding crossbows at low levels on the hardcore server.  Obviously it's an advantage that a lot of players are willing to shell out for. I can't help but wonder how many of the players on the server are buying even bigger advantages like +8 stat tomes.  Even if they are, it doesn't spoil my fun.  However, having so many advantages available with the swipe of a card does seem to go against the spirit of competition that the developers at Standing Stone Games are trying to sell us on.

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.]

DDO update 5: an unpleasent surprise

I sincerely hope I am mistaken about this [Edit: yeah, I was...turns out it's an unintended bug in the patch]

As far as I can tell, the buffer for outdoor maps got changed from four (i.e., your character will remember where you have been in four outdoor zones until you hit a 5th, then one character specific map will get replaced) to zero. This means that if you have the temerity to explore an outdoor zone and log off before doing every single thing in the zone, when you next log on your map will be completely blacked out... as if you never set foot in the zone. This makes it one hell of a lot harder to figure out where to go or what you missed in between sessions in outdoor exploration areas.

Maybe I hit a bug in Tangle-Root Gorge. I really really hope so, because the alternative is that Turbine is bat shit crazy. The outdoor zones are huge, and it's hard to remember where you have been. Getting all the exploration points and all the rare kills critically depends on remembering where you have been. A map that shows where you have been recently is absolutely essential to exploring these areas. If they are having storage capacity issues on their end all they need to do is make the map storage data client side. Yes that means we could easily open up all of our maps with simple hacks. But really, who the hell cares? Figuring out where to go should not be the primary challenge of the game.

Being rewarded for exploring is awesome. I loved clearing out maps under the old system, it gave you a real sense of progress as you went looking for all the exploration points. Losing every bit of that progress the moment you log out is poor game design. If some of your users choose to set the exploration aspect of the game on fire to use cheated up maps, that is their loss. Those of us that enjoy exploring will still do it the legit way. Don't kick us all in the 'nads because you are too cheap to pay for storage space on your end, or too lazy to move it to our end.

My apologies for the rabidity of this post to my regular readers. There is some history. I was pretty ticked when I discovered the 4 map buffer after spending three evenings scouting out out the entire Three Barrel Cove map (yes, even the empty ocean bits). I hit a new zone, and my map got completely blanked. I rank pretty high on the explorer end of the Bartle continuum, and flushing maps I've filled out jams a "Yeebo angry" button on the back of my neck. But after some reflection, I realized you really don't bop back and forth between more than four outdoor areas that often. There is no reason to, the lower level maps you have filled out are largely useless to you once you level out of them.

No map buffer at all, on the other hand, jams the same button on the back of my neck about ten times as hard. In my myopic world, this change is insanity of the first order. Be on the lookout for a guy with long hair ranting on random street corners about maps, Turbine, and the number five.

Final Edit (Update): It seems that my nerd rage was unwarranted. The issue is a bug, that will get fixed in the next few days.

http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p=3091020&postcount=42

All I can say is thank goodness. Now I can get on with bitching about the realID fiasco. Oh, no wait, that's not an issue now either. Well, there's always the latest Allod's patch. Maybe I'll fire that up and see if it's as bad as they say on the forums ;-)

DDO: The rest of update 5

Lest this blog become known as Yeebo's random DDO rants, I feel obligated to give some more details about book five now that I've had time to mess with it.

The guild leveling system I like quite a bit. Whenever you finish a quest chain, in addition to the normal rewards you are offered an item that will feed points to your guild. Even soloing low level quests I've managed to add a few thousand points to the guild I joined on Khyber to check the system out. The guild I'm in now is closing quickly on guild airship territory, I look forward to messing around with that system. A rumor I have heard is that the airship system strongly encourages you to buy items from the DDO item shop to fit out your ship. Not being in a guild that has unlocked one, I can neither confirm nor deny that. But I hope the worst versions of the rumor I've heard are exaggerations.

The new content pack is also absolutely brilliant. It's a bit puzzling that it's aimed at level five-ish characters, since we already have so much content in that level range. However, even doing normal mode on a level eight character I got a ton of XP from the first two adventures. I also found the story lines and quest mechanics to be really engaging. SPOILER ... For example, at one point in the second chain a bunch of barrels and boxes fly up into the air and assemble into a sort of trash monster...very surprising and very cool...END SPOILER. I'm really looking forward to the next quests in the pack, the first two were some of the best content I've seen in DDO. The only issue I ran into was that I had a bit of trouble figuring out who to talk to first to start things up. It turns out the first NPC is all the way in the back of the House P compound. Do not get distracted by the chick balancing on the head of a wolf near the entrance:

I also got stuck on one part where I was convinced that a Mario Brothers style approach to something would work. Many falls later I realized I was mistaken (at least at my jump level). However I didn't mind at all. The simple puzzle solving is one of the things I actually really enjoy about DDO.

Sacrificing the low level game to balance the high level game

I made it back from a conference (to which my recent lack of posts can be attributed) last night. Despite my jet lag, I decided to spend some time messing around with DDO's update five. I’m sure that the higher level features such as the new guild airships , the class spec line changes, and the new module are fine and dandy. However, on my (maximum of level 8) toons, the only real difference I've noticed so far is that dual wielding has been nerfed to hell and back.

[Beginning: technical details, skip down for the main points]

As it stands, with the first level of two-weapon fighting, you are giving up 2 attack bonus and very likely a shield (even at low levels easily 6 AC) for a 40% chance to proc an attack with your off-hand when you swing your main-hand weapon. Should the off-hand attack proc, you still have to make your to-hit roll or it is wasted. For my low level rogue, this means I get one successful offhand hit in roughly once every two or three attack cycles (based on looking at my combat logs), where before I was reliably getting one or two hits per attack cycle with my offhand weapon.

For low level characters that can use a shield, the benefit of TWF (two weapon fighting) doesn’t seem to outweigh the attack and AC penalty. Particularly when you consider the fact that shields which do damage to foes that strike you are fairly common. Add in that that your main-hand weapon is more accurate, and I suspect you are looking at similar DPS to dual wielding using a sword-and-board while having significantly higher defense. Even for classes like Rogue that can’t use shields, it’s iffy. Such characters tend to have low attack bonuses to begin with, so a -2 main-hand attack penalty for an off-hand attack that may or may not proc seems questionable.

The offhand proc chance can be boosted to 60% and 80% by getting improved and greater two-weapon fighting at higher levels. But that doesn’t help out any of my low level characters, or any new player that excitedly tries out dual wielding only to discover that it’s next to useless (until much higher level). In order to slightly reduce the DPS that TWF builds were putting out at high levels, Turbine essentially completely trashed dual wielding at low levels.

[End: technical details]

DDO seems to have a problem in general that the low level and high level game are at odds. One symptom of this is that very often a build that is optimal at higher levels starts off quite weak. For example, endgame focused builds of hybrid classes often use the primary spell casting stat as a "dump stat," in some cases eliminating the ability to cast spells at all until the teens. Now we see this problem extending even to overall balancing of the game. Turbine apparently can't figure out a way to balance dual wielding save to cripple it at low levels, when squishy melee classes like Rogue and Ranger need a DPS boost the most.

Oddly enough, Turbine's stated reason for modifying two-weapon fighting wasn’t primarilly to reduce the DPS it does. Supposedly, they did it to reduced combat lag in raids. They claim to have nerfed one of the most popular fighting styles across the board to address an issue that the majority of players will never encounter. My reaction to that is (A) we are not stupid, we know that the main point likely is to reduce the DPS of TWF builds, and (B) if combat lag in raids really was their main reason for the change, they just nerfed the hell much of the player base…particularly low level players and new players… to improve the endgame. That would be an abysmally stupid approach to the problem.

New players are the lifeblood of a MMO. Making their gameplay more difficult to help out the end game vets that are already committed to your game is poor business. The vets really don't give the first crap about the low level game. New players, on the other hand, will stay or quit based on it.

Played lately: DDO

Posting has been a bit slow (i.e., absent) because I was out of town over the weekend (in Sante Fe, NM). Going from 6000 feet and light snow to 85 degrees at sea level in one day when I came back was absolutely surreal. Since getting back, I've been putting more time into Dungeons and Dragons online. I now own every race and class apart from Favored Soul, and most of the low level content packs. My main, a drow elf paladin, is sitting on the cusp of level 6.

Paladins are a solid solo class in DDO. They wear plate, hit like trucks, have very good saving throws [think resists in a typical MMO], and by level four have a lot of self healing abilities. In the great bulk of instances, I can get by without using any consumables at all. For the really gnarly instances Paladins can also use wands of cure medium wounds, which are abundant and inexpensive on the auction house. I have been able so solo several long encounters meant for a balanced party on normal without resorting to hirelings.

My goal in the game is to see how far I can get without repeating any content, and without using hirelings. That means I am buying a lot of content packs, but that's OK because it also means more for my alts to do whenever I start raising them. The one instance I've broken that rule with is the one where you can get Muckbane. Muckbane takes zero damage from oozes [mobs that will trash your weapons very quickly if you engage them in melee, destroying them altogether if you aren't careful], and is a low level rare drop I consider nearly essential. If you follow this walk through, you can make a run for it in around ten minutes. It took me three tries.

My favorite content pack so far is Three Barrel Cove. It contains a huge outdoor area with tons of objectives. The two dungeons I've been through in it are also some of the most unique I've encountered in DDO. It's a bit pricey at 650 points (roughly six dollars at the best exchange rate), and is challenging to solo (likely impossible without hirelings for some classes).

Despite the fact that it's rumored to suck, Catacombs was a close second for me. A bit combat heavy, but I enjoyed the storyline a lot. For a melee class blunt weapons area nearly required, some of the mobs are practically immune to slashing weapons. The quest chains it contains are great for a short burst of fun.

In my experience, purchased content packs are noticeably better than most of the free content. DDO is free-to-play by definition, but I suspect it would be pretty grindy without premium content. Which is pretty much as it should be, Turbine isn't a charity organization after all. I feel like I've gotten a good value for the money I've spent so far. Regardless , the first three or four levels are absolutely free, and that is more than enough playtime to figure out whether the game is for you or not.

DDO: not as bad as I thought

After giving myself almost a solid week to cool off, I decided to try the combat changes with a fresh eye. I'm not sure if swing speeds have been adjusted a bit from the last time I tried them (this is what I suspect), or if taking a break from the game and playing much slower paced MMOs like WoW and LoTRO for a week gave me a different perspective. In any case they don't seem so bad to me now.

After spending an entire evening with the system, I can describe it more thoroughly. The current attack pattern is that your guy does a three hit combo, with a slight (maybe one to two seconds) pause where he leans forward holding his sword out in between combos. I have read that you gain more attacks in your combo chain as your base attack bonus increases but I can't confirm it (mine is at +1 on a level two wizard). I also haven't rolled up a new wizard just to see if his attack combo is fewer hits.

Overall attack speed is slower than it was before (at least at the low levels that matter to new players like me). The transition from the old system to this new one was absolutely jarring, and I'm still not convinced that it was warranted. Assuming for the sake of argument that the change was warranted, the way that Turbine handled the transition was horrible. We all wake up one morning and find that the combat has been greatly altered, without any real warning from Turbine that it was coming.

That said, I think the combat system in DDO is still overall quite good. Once I gave myself enough distance to see it with fresh eyes, I find that I am still having a lot of fun in DDO. Spells and special abilities are still as responsive as they have ever been. After adjusting to the pauses in between swing combos, the combat even begins to feel a little more rhythmic and strategic than it did before.

Edit: After more testing, the difference between what I remembered from last week and the way the game is playing now is actually lag. The patch originally added lag for me in places I wasn't getting any before. The crazy thing is that the lag affected mainly my swing animations, not walking around or other animations. In the last week lag has apparently been improved immensely. Tonight, it took me a while to stumble on a spot that was still laggy enough for the bugged animation to show up again. In those spots my dude now appears to swing exactly as I remember, holding the sword for a good long while behind his head before he decides to swing. Now that I am seeing the real swing speed nerf, I can see that I overreacted. If you give it a chance it's not that bad.