Ark's Ark

My DDO server, Cannith, today seems to have become something of a victim of its own success, with players being greeted with the following:

Even the loading screen looks impatient.

According to the forum, even VIP subscribers, who have priority over premium folks like myself, can’t get in. It’s possible that the error message is itself erroneous, and the servers are not actually full, but something else is stopping us from being able to log in. The other servers seem to be letting people in fine. As yet there hasn’t been any developer comment.

Cannith is the newest server, launched alongside F2P, and as such received the lion’s share of the new players. Perhaps it is time for another server to be opened. With the server populations booming since the move to Free-to-play, it’s a bit odd that we’re still only on seven servers. One possibility is that with DDO’s instanced style, it might just be preferable to add hardware to existing servers, rather than needing to open up entire new ones, but either way, we want to be able to get in and play!

The end rewards for the Catacombs quest-line got a revamp in Module 5, with many of the end-reward weapons getting an improvement.

Blade of Inquisition: Gained Lesser Undead Bane.
Dagger of Inquisition: Gained Lesser Undead Bane.
Eternal Rest: Gained Lesser Undead Bane.
Guidance: Gained Holy.
Morningstar of the Heretic: Gained Bodyfeeder.
Pillar of Light: Gained Radiance II.

But what Osgard, d’Kundarak engineer, is after today is Gerard Dryden’s Mace. It’s found in a chest behind a locked door in the Dryden Family Tomb. Back when the game was young it was a +1 heavy mace of Undead Bane, but was later changed to being just lesser undead bane. Module 5 changed it back, and changed it’s material to bone, so it is once again fairly desirable for folks looking for a decent skeleton-thumping weapon, as well as being safe for use against rust monsters. With it being usable from level 2 onwards, it can make the many undead dungeons a low level character will face far more pleasant!

Map to Gerard Dryden's Mace

Because it is chest-loot, and not very far in, Osgard is going to engage in something of a wheeze. The Dryden Family Tomb is part four of a fairly long quest series, and you can only get in there if you’re on the right stage of the questline. In order to get as many chances at the mace as possible, once the chest has been checked, Osgard recalls out without completing the quest, and waits for the dungeon to reset after 5 minutes of being empty.

Such antics have, of course, been anticipated by the designers, and after about 8 openings the chest will become “Ransacked”, having no good loot, and will remain that way until a week has past from the first time Osgard opened it. You might need all 8 tries too, as the mace is not terribly common. The best plan would be to take along some loyal friends who don’t want it who can pass it to you if they prove luckier! Gerard Dryden’s Mace does not bind to account until equipped. This one will likely become an heirloom passed down through my characters.

What wonders lie within?

As it turned out, Osgard ransacked the chest with no mace to be seen, though he did find a variety of useful bits and pieces. So it was that Ronekra Mirrorborn was called forth to complete the task, not least because I need to prove to myself that the mace drops in that chest before I could post this! Eventually, the random number generator took pity on me, and the mace was passed, with much grumbling from Ronekra, to it’s rightful owner.

I sense much skeleton bashing in Osgard's near future.

Because I was asked, here’s a little guide on how to make money in DDO:

Like anywhere else, becoming rich in Dungeons and Dragons Online involves two things; maximising your income, and minimising your expenses.

Some basics

When shopping for new gear it is best to check the brokers, as well as the auction house. While most of the best random gear does end up for auction, free players can only have one auction at a time, and many other people don’t really want to fiddle about with the AH, so you can find the occasional lovely bit of kit on the brokers, at a non-inflated price.

All the brokers for clothing and jewellery, as well as the lowest level armour and weapons brokers, can be found in the marketplace. The higher level armour brokers can be found in Second Gauntlet Goods, in House Kundarak, conveniently opposite the teleporter. The higher level weapon brokers can be found in Fare Trades within House Deneith.

When selling items that you don’t think are going to be popular enough to be worth auctioning, you should always try to sell it to the appropriate broker, as they will pay significantly more than a general merchant. Knowing what equipment will sell is an inexact science. Try to consider what different classes would be looking for in their equipment, and what item properties work well together on the same item.

Some people like to have a separate character for trading, with maximised charisma and haggling skills. That’s a bit too much fiddling around for my liking, but you should keep hold of the best haggle and charisma gear you find in your adventures, and wear it when doing any significant buying or selling.

Collectables

Collectables are key to getting a decent moneypile early on in DDO. Grab every single loot bag and prod every collectable node that you see. While most of the items you’ll get for turning collectables in are pretty junky, they’re still worth money. Depending on your class, you may well find the wands you can receive from some harbour and marketplace collections useful, particularly the healing wands. Wands of cure light/moderate are not cheap to buy, and are the sort of thing that can save an adventuring party from disaster.

More importantly, from a financial stand-point, are certain collectables that you’ll find from time to time. There are a few that have a second use, in crafting. Annoyingly, this second purpose is not mentioned on the item, so you should probably jot the following collectables down. On my server they are all worth at least 5000 gold, and often more.

Vial of Pure Water
Tome: Prophecies of Khyber
Silver Flame Hymnal
Luminescent Dust
Sparkling Dust
Fragrant Drowshood
Deadly Feverblanch
Lightning-Split Soarwood

Strings of Prayer Beads and Funerary Tokens are also used in the same crafting system, but are so common that most folks don’t need to buy them. You may still find the occasional high-level purchaser though.

Whether you choose to sell them on the auction house, or save them for your own needs, you need to make sure you don’t accidentally turn them in to a collector! I keep mine safe in the bank to prevent any accidents. You can see the Stone of Change recipes that require them here. Once you know what you’re looking for, you’ll notice that some adventures have nodes more suitable to collecting them than others. As an example, I have always found the nodes in the secret room of the Harbour quest “Bringing the Light” particularly good for Vials of Pure Water.

One other collectable you might find early on are Eberron Dragonshard fragments. These are rather rare, and come in three sizes, but can be found from any collectable node. They’re popular because they can be handed in for xp-bonus potions, but given that they’re worth at least 50,000 gold, you might prefer to just sell them!

For all these collectables, have a look at what other people on your server are selling them for. Whether or not you decide to undercut them depends on how much of a hurry you’re in. Usually there’s something of a standard going rate, and if you put your items up at that price they’ll sell eventually, without you driving the price down.

As you get further into the game you’ll come across other bits and pieces that sell well, such as adamantine ore, but the items available to you in the harbor and marketplace should be enough to get you off to a flying start. Good luck, Moneybags McGee!

That’s pretty much how I’ve made my cash pile over the years (though I’m as good at spending it as making it, alas). If I think of anything else, I’ll add it here.

Ark Tales! Woo-oo!

The US DDO servers are currently down for a hotfix, which began at 1 pm EST, and is due to finish at 5 pm EST.

This is primarily to fix a serious problem that was introduced with yesterday’s Update. The new guild renown system was causing serious and unexpected lag across the servers, and had to be disabled after a couple hours of the servers coming up yesterday. It was a little frustrating for guilds who were fired up and ready to go on a guild-levelling spree, especially given that it was the major feature for the update. With any luck, today’s tweaks will allow everybody to get back on the journey to owning a fancy new airship.

Before the Guild Renown was switched off, we were making pretty good progress towards Guild Level 5. Parcels of renown can be found in chests, as end-rewards, and in small amounts for killing monsters. It is thought that it was the renown from monsters, randomly occurring after kills, that was responsible for the lag.

Here’s the patchnotes for today’s hotfix:

* Guild Renown is once again dropping from monster kills, treasure chests and end rewards.
* It is no longer possible to reassign Guild Renown found in treasure chests to other party members.
* Monk handwraps that have mutations with a save are no longer having the effect go off 100% of the time. The party had to end at some point.
* A bug in the Black Mausoleum quest has been fixed and the adventure will once again be open for players.
* We have resolved the issue behind the server crashes that were occurring after the release of Update 5.

It’s a major update incoming for Dungeons and Dragons Online tomorrow, as the Carnival of Shadows rolls into Stormreach.

Aside from the new lowish-level adventure series, I’m particularly looking forward to seeing the new guild system in action. I’ll be lending a hand with OnedAwesome’s levelling, and will report on our lovely new flying ship next week.

Clerics and Monks gain new Prestige enhancement lines, and I’ll be aiming my monk at the Daelkyr-fighting Shintao path. The only Wizard Prestige path, the necromantic Pale Master, has been made much more viable by the addition of extra negative energy arcane spells, and other tweaks. My main character, coincidentally called Arkenor, is more of a conjuring/transmuting persuasion, and he’ll find the new Augment Summoning feat a must have, and will be swapping out Eschew Materials for it.

* Augment Summoning
o Benefit: Your summoned creatures, charmed minions, and hirelings have +4 to all ability scores, increased health, and increased fortification.
o Special: Wizards may select this feat when they receive bonus feats.

Augment Summoning looks to be massively useful to Necromancers, Enchanters, Conjurers, and just about anyone anyone who uses hirelings, charms, or summons. As hirelings are getting boosted already in this update, combining that with this feat may lead to to me developing an inferiority complex when I see them in action!

Poor DDO Arkenor might need that boost, because it sounds like his dual-wielding antics are going to be somewhat reduced, as off-hand attacks are changed from being assured at certain points in the attack sequence, to being a chance-based proc. I’m not going to get too upset about that until I see it in action, but it does sound like it might be harsh on dual-wielders who aren’t also rangers. I hope his particular style of melee wizard remains viable.

The dual-wielding changes are intended to reduce lag in raids, mostly, and I would have preferred it if the changes then only applied in raid situations, leaving the rest of the game to use the current system. We’ll see next week how big a difference the new system really makes.

Arkenor and his rooftop Mace Kata.

The new trapmaking feat, that allows you to assemble traps and grenades from ingredients gleaned from traps you’ve dismantled, also sounds pretty great, and leaves me in something of a quandary. Ark is currently Wizard 8/Rogue 3, and I wasn’t planning on him taking any more rogue. However, now that Trapmaking is a free feat with Rogue 4, I’m getting rather tempted. I may resist, and leave trapmaking for my d’Kundarak Paladin/Rogue engineer. (Remind me to do “Dark Moments in Character Building” posts on both those chaps.)

In addition to these changes which caught my eye, there is a thick and nutritious soup of general tweaks and fixes that is sure to leave everybody feeling filled with patch-day wonder. It’s an impressive body of work that leaves me already looking forward to hearing what Update 6 involves. I’m still holding out for GNOMES!

The full notes follow after the leap (If you’re on the front page). They’re the preview release notes from last week on Lamannia, so they may change a little for tomorrow, but probably not by much.

Keep reading →

This is the first fruit of my “Ask me things” post. My thanks to JB for giving me something to write about! He asked:

Getting the most out of a free MMO, as I understand it there is stuff you can do in DDO to unlock stuff for free/get bonus turbine points etc. Would be interesting to see how much of the game you can actually get without spending any money.

I should mention that this only applies to the US DDO servers run by Turbine. The European ones run by Codemasters are still subscription only, but European players have no problem signing up for a US DDO account.

Playing for free in DDO is perfectly possible. The basic classes and the free content adventures would probably be sufficient for a lot of casual gamers. While it is possible to get Turbine points through play, most people would find it a bit too labour intensive to get more than an adventure pack or twos worth, but again, that would probably be sufficient for a lot of players.

There are two separate tracks upon which you can earn Turbine points. One is per server, and one is per character. Both are dependant of the Favor system.

What is favor?

Every adventure in DDO gains you favour with one of the city’s factions. How much favor you have from a given adventure depends on whether you have completed it on normal, hard, or elite difficulty. For instance, you might have an adventure which rewards favor with the Silver Flame, and it would give you 3 points if you’d completed it on normal, 6 on hard, or 9 on elite. The amount of favor you have from it is based on the highest level difficulty you have ever completed it on. This is a once only reward. You don’t get more favor for repeating the adventure, once you’ve done it on elite. As any given character has a finite number of adventures available to them, they also have a finite amount of possible favor.

Your Adventure Compendium tracks which adventures you have completed at which difficulty, and how much favor you have gained from them. Longer adventures are usually worth more favor than shorter ones.

DDO's Adventure Compendium

The patron tab shows you how much favor you have with particular factions, and your total earned favor. Filling a favor bar will result in some sort of reward or bonus. Most notably, getting 400 total favor will unlock the Drow race for you on that server. This is not too difficult, and I would suggest this method instead of buying the Drow race with your precious Turbine points.

DDO's Patron window

The Per-Character path to Turbine Points

Per character, you simply get 25 Turbine points for every 100 favor you earn. If you only use the free content, there are currently 1001 points worth of favor available, worth a potential 250 Turbine points.

The Per-Server path to Turbine Points

On each server, the first time one of your characters reaches a certain favor threshold, you receive Turbine points. The thresholds are as follows:

This is where the quick and easy points are. You only need 5 favor to get a decent wallop of 50 Turbine points. You can get 5 favor simply by working through the tutorial, up to the the adventure under the tavern, “The Collaborator”. Doable in about 20 minutes, I’d say, and you can do this once on every single server. There are 7 servers, giving you 350 points if you did this on each one. You could, if so inclined, go for 25 favor on each server, for another 175 points. It can be a good opportunity to try out a class or build before unleashing it on your main server.

When you have your points, you then have a choice as to what to use them on. If you’re determined not to spend any money, then you should probably save them for adventure packs. The Turbine shop runs a lot of sales and special deals, and you can save some points by picking up adventures when they are discounted. Any adventures you buy have favor rewards for completion, so you buying adventures increases the amount of favor, and thus Turbine points that you can earn. Adventure pack purchases are account-wide, so, if you really wanted to have the max number of characters on each server, they can almost pay for themselves. The cheaper Adventure packs start at 250 Turbine Points. Shan-To-Kor is a good first one, if you’re not sure which to get, because completion of the whole quest series grants you a permanent discount in the Marketplace, and it also grants Coin Lord favor, which unlocks additional inventory space.

That’s all a bit time consuming for me, mind you. Grinding away across multiple servers and characters just to get Turbine points is not especially fun. It does all depend upon your available time and finances, of course, but keep in mind that a Turbine point is worth approximately 1.5 US cents. Myself, I try to walk a path that involves buying some points, while trying to maximise any free points I can get without knocking myself out. It’s worth noting that you only need to buy points once, even the smallest $6.50 pack, in order for your account to be upgraded permanently to a Premium account, which has far less restrictions than a completely free one, and will make your time in Stormreach much more pleasurable.

Armonica the Warforged Bard says Hello!

Warforged are a race specific to Eberron, the setting for Turbine’s Dungeons and Dragons Online. Constructs built with one purpose in mind; the waging of war. Their creators were a little too clever for their own good, and in their pursuit of building walking weapons that would be able to make good decisions without direction, they accidentally managed to imbue them with sentience. For a while this wasn’t too much of a problem, as the Warforged were happy to do what they were told, which mostly involved hitting whoever they were told to.

The problem with sentience is that eventually you start wonder exactly why you’re hitting these people, and why you have to do what the shouty person tells you anyway. As the outside world realised that Warforged were indeed people, rather than simple machines, the public became uncomfortable on a number of grounds. As a result, at the end of the war, Warforged were given the same rights as any other sentient being, most importantly “self-ownership”. At the same time, the House Cannith creation forges which produced them were destroyed.

That leaves today’s Warforged in an odd position. There will never be any more of them (unless rumours of surviving forges are to be believed), but they do not age, and are fairly robust. Having known little more than war for their short lives, and having not been taught anything beyond what was of use to their masters, they are now sent out into the world, possessed with an insatiable curiosity, and a desire to become more than they have been.

So it was that Armonica the Warforged arrived on the continent of Xen’drik. Wandering for a time, seeking purpose, until one day he happened upon a musician playing in Stormreach’s marketplace. So taken with the beauty of the song was he that he decided, there and then, that he was going to be a bard, making music for all to hear!

Warforged, on the whole, are not very good musicians. Their stat modifiers are +2 Constitution, -2 Wisdom, and -2 Charisma, leaving them weak in the very stat that a Bard needs most, charisma. Nevertheless, what they lack in natural talent they make up for in enthusiasm, and before too long Armonica was playing bass lute in a local band.

He only knows three chords so far, but he plays them well.

In DDO the great strength of the Warforged is their immunities. Poison, disease, energy draining, sleep, exhaustion, nausea, and paralysis simply do not affect them. Neither do they need to breathe, so have no fear of water. They also have enhancements and feats that will increase their damage resistance. The main downside (apart from Rust Monsters) to avoiding so many of adventuring’s nuisances is that healing spells do not affect them as strongly. Starting out, a heal will only fix 50% of what it would on a fully organic being, though there are enhancements that a Warforged can take to raise that amount. There is also a line of wizardly repair spells, mirroring the clerical cures, that do have a full affect on them, which makes a Warforged wizard or sorcerer quite an interesting proposition.

Unfortunately, their difficulty to heal has made them somewhat unpopular with the more closed-minded of Eberron’s flesh-based population. This is not really fair, as while an individual heal does fix them less than otherwise, they also require less fixing in the first place. Happily, as a bard Armonica has some healing spells, so it tends not to be an issue.

Warforged are not one of the basic races available under the Free to Play scheme, costing 595 Turbine Points at normal prices. They’re so “Eberonny” though that I could not resist splashing out, especially as I was used to having them available to me as a subscriber in Europe.

He’s actually Rogue 1, Fighter 1, Bard 1 at the moment, but the majority of his levels going forward will be bard. I find it difficult to create a character that doesn’t have the ability to deal with at least some of the traps and locks that will present themselves. The level of fighter was to unlock a wide range of weaponry, and also for the free feat, which I took glee in spending on the Exotic Weapon Proficiency of Great Crossbow, which could just as easily be called a small ballista.

He’s the only character I’ve gotten into Massively’s OnedAwesome guild so far. If you see him, give him a wave, and remember to be kind to your Warforged colleagues, as they’re the ones who’ll be dragging your life crystals back to the shrine when you all get cloudkilled.