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I already added this to the end of the original DDO free bag post, but then I realised that most folks have probably looked at that days ago, so would miss it. It’s just a little video I knocked up to show where to find the various bag NPCs. I’m a bit out of practise at video-making, and need to make sure I have the mic a little further away from my mouth next time! You can find a variety of equally dubiously-crafted movies over at my YouTube channel! Dungeons and Dragons Online likes to bombard you with things that you need to store, while simultaneously keeping your inventory space rather tight. It is not an unusual tactic for F2P games which want to gently persuade you to purchase additional storage and bags, and DDO will be very happy to sell you all manner of extra bank vaults and storage bags through the Turbine Point Store. However, there is much we can do to delay the moment that we really need to do that, and to minimise what we do need to buy when our free options have been exhausted. (I spend plenty on Turbine points. I just prefer to save them for adventure packs.) Inventory and Bank SlotsDealing with inventory tabs and bank vaults first, you begin with three inventory tabs, and one bank vault. We can raise these via favor. If you’re a bit vague on how favor works, I covered it in this post a while back. 75 Coin Lords favor will score you another inventory tab. This is EASY, even if you’re pure F2P, as an awful lot of the early quests fall under their jurisdiction. 150 Coin Lords favor opens up to you the opportunity for a 5th tab, but this time you’ll first need to acquire a collapsed portable hole, either from chest loot, or through the auction house. In my experience, these are not super-rare, and you’ll find one yourself eventually. Once you acquire the hole, you then have to pay Ryo Silverbow 10,000 plat to turn it into your 5th tab. Money well spent. Picking up the Shan-To-Kor pack ( a must have, in my opinion, if only because it’s really cheap and completing it gives you a discount in the marketplace), will let you hit the Coin Lords favor targets a bit sooner. House Kundarak runs Stormreach’s banking system (and most of the bank services across Eberron). 75 favor with them will allow you to buy a 2nd bank vault for 2000 plat, and 150 favor will enable a third vault for 8000 plat. Getting this favor is a little trickier than for the Coin Lords, as you don’t really hit d’Kundarak quests until about level 5. There are enough free quests for a pure free player to get both bank tabs, and both inventory tabs, though it’ll take a fair bit of effort. So that’s it for the free inventory and bank slots. Let’s look at the bags that’ll let us use them efficiently. BagsMari Mosshand is the first NPC players will see upon arrival in Stormreach Harbour from Korthos. Veteran characters, who start at level 4, don’t get these bags as part of their gear package, so will want to pay her a visit too. She will give: Also in the harbour, standing at the gateway to the marketplace, is Felix d’Cannith, who will be happy to hand over: A couple of other NPCs have the same offer, but he’s the one you’re likely to meet first. So, we’ve gotten our full set of basic starter bags, but they’ll start to overflow almost as soon as you acquire them. In the Marketplace, there is an exit to an area called “The Twelve”. It offers a variety of high and mid-level quests, but we can pop in there at low levels for a bit of help. Head into the central tower, and speak to Jeanselme Brucetius, and he’ll hand you a small ingredient bag. (30 slots). This is not bound, but is exclusive, so you can only have one of them in your inventory at once. You can keep multiple in your bank or shared bank though, so this does give you storage options. Until recently he handed out a tiny bag, but he seems to have upgraded his wares to one-up the newcomer in the harbour. That’s all the free bags for now, and somebody starting out is going to find themselves with inventory issues pretty quickly. Help is at hand though, if you can scrape up about 9000 plat, depending on your haggle skill, which is not as daunting as it might feel in your first few levels. Drudori Alzander, in House Phiarlan’s Erstwhile Emporium, sells: Medium Collectable Bags (30 slots, Exclusive), Pretty handy, though I suspect that her ingredient bag is the same one that Jeanselme Brucetius is handing out, so you won’t be able to have both in your inventory at once.  Osgard's new Artificer brother goes window-shopping for bags. Later, he'll go bag-shopping for windows. and not be able to afford those either. Of the three, I’d saying grabbing the Medium collectables bag, when you have the cash to spare, will do wonders for your sanity and bag space. Gem bags aren’t so vital, as you don’t really need to store them for any length of time. Nice to have, of course, when you can afford it. There are 3 bags which drop as chest loot. I should say that these are far from common, but they are unbound, so can be found on the auction house, for annoyingly high prices. They’re not exclusive either, so they work perfectly as a central store in your shared bank if you have one. Large Collectibles Bag, 80 slots Be careful with the auction house, as a variety of jokers like to put the Phiarlan purchased ones up for sale at boosted prices, catching out folks who don’t know they can just go to the source. For the large bags, prices will vary according to your server and the moment, but you’re likely looking at several hundred thousand platinum pieces. They’re not something a new player is going to be able to pick up any time soon, but you *might* get lucky and loot one. The large bags can also be gained by trading in 150 Planar Shards from the Subterrane. That’s a level 16 wilderness zone, mind you, and requires purchase of the Vault of Twilight adventure pack. The large ingredient bag is also the reward for 100 favor with The Twelve, but given that their lowest level adventure is level 15, and only one of those is free, that’s not immediately helpful. Your bags are bursting with potions, wands, ingredients, and gear that you want to save “just in case”. What is the frugal adventurer to do? Desperate MeasuresFinally, there is one other option for storage, though it is rather more fiddley and metagamey. We are allowed to have multiple accounts, and it is also perfectly allowable for us to use them simultaneously. So it is that I have a second account where my good friends Potiony Pete, and Klaustein Cakewatcher look after my potion and winter festival cake supplies. The winter festival cakes are a sore point with me. I feel that Christmas events ought to be on the generous side, and indeed, the event IS generous, in giving you multiple inventory tabs worth of different cakes and biscuits. But the cookie jar, that can be used to store them, has to be bought with Turbine Points. That offends my Christmas spirit slightly, so I feel no guilt at all in letting Klaustein Cakewatcher take up the strain.
There we go. I hope that was useful to someone. If you have any questions, or anything else you’d like me to go over, drop me a comment!
Update: I thought I’d make a little video to accompany this post. Lo, here it be: So, in the last couple of months since I last posted, what have I been up to? I’ve played through both Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 on Insanity difficulty. I’d been nagged to try them by pretty much every gamer friend who ever heard I’d not played them, and I’m glad I finally buckled. I’ll definitely be grabbing Mass Effect 3 when it materialises. I have a terrible habit of insisting I play any game on the hardest possible difficulty level. It’s a tendency that bleeds over into my MMO behaviour, as Maltheas and my stable of odd DDO characters amply demonstrate. Getting through the Mass Effect saga on insanity (which involved a little shenanigans in order to get ME1 to let me even play at that difficulty on my first playthrough) has reaffirmed to myself my gamer credentials. Whether I’d still be as good at a game that does not let you pause to have a little think is another matter entirely! From hardcore to the supposedly casual, I spent a few weeks playing Wizard 101. I found the pet breeding system somewhat fascinating, but it involves quite incredible amounts of grinding, while the rather random results can leave you with very little to show for it. Gardening too was quite fun, but you have to log in far too often to keep your plants alive. Not, to be honest, the sort of obsessive behaviour I would want to encourage in children. I’ve been playing DDO for the last few days. I still had a bunch of Turbine points left over from the 6000 European players got when we merged Codemaster accounts into our Turbine ones. So I picked up the Artificer class. Wow, that’s a powerful class, though that might be more to do with their ability to use repeating crossbows , which any other class could do quite easily with the expenditure of a feat, than the rest of the class features. Repeating crossbows are the machine guns of the DDO world, putting out incredible amounts of ranged damage. I might be inspired to do a proper post on the Artificer, as it’s really rather fun. Toying with making some DDO videos. Especially now that, after applying a year or so ago, Youtube has finally added me to their partner scheme, and Brell knows I could use the money. Will have to see how my energy and enthusiasm keeps up, as I’ve been having a very strange time of it recently, health-wise, with parts of me attaining never-before seen might, and other parts choosing my moment of triumph to quite literally self-destruct. Not sure what sort of DDO videos might be most of interest, so if you have any ideas I’d love to hear them. Oh, and I’ve pre-ordered the EQ2 expansion, Age of Discovery. I’ve not been playing EQ2 much, and didn’t even get the steam up to do the new Nights of the Dead quest with Maltheas. Largely I’m still rather annoyed about the whole stat/item revamp shenanigans, which has made everything feel a bit blander than it used to. But there’s a lot of cool new features in Age of Discovery, and I’m not going to deny myself the chance to pootle about with them! My crafted gear continues to have changed every time I check it. This picture gets ever more difficult to read, so you’ll need to click it, then hit the little expand arrow to get a good look. Ignore the yellow numbers and the difference in procs, as they’re just from adornments I plugged in. It’s the green and blue numbers that are of interest. In the latest instalment the shield got better, while the other two pieces got worse.:  My gear continues to mutate You can’t plan when everything keeps changing like this, and the chaos seems set to continue. We’ve had a hotfix today:
I’m not well placed to know what was wrought upon those zones, though I am told that existing gear was restatted, rather than creating all-new stuff. That’s a good thing in my book. Charms also got updated. The only change I’ve noticed personally is that Jin’tu’s Gift, a high level crafter reward, has become godly. It used to be a charm wearable by any 80+ crafter who gained it during their Hua Mein questline. It had 50 wisdom on it, so it was pretty great for a priest. Thus it was that I wore it with pride. This is what it has become:  And no, I'm not taking it off. OK, it lost some wisdom, but I’ll take that :D. It’s all a horrible mistake of course, and it is only due to the fact I was already wearing it that I can still use it, as you now have to be a level 80 adventurer to put it on. I *could* take it off, but I would not be able to put it back on, and if I can’t have my old Jin’tu’s Gift, I’m going to keep on wearing this one til they pry it from my cold crafting ratonga claws. Jin’tu’s Gift is one of many items that should never have been allowed anywhere near the stat generating script. I honestly don’t believe that whoever is behind all this has much of an understanding of EQ2. Is there hope? Maybe, but I’m not holding my breath. These following announcements sound all well and good, but if they’re still relying on scripts and people who don’t know enough about the game to not assign adventurer stats to crafter gear, or remove class stats from Heritage rewards, it could just as easily make things worse. Anyhows, the following statements are from Smokejumper:
And:
The native tribes of the Chaos Wastes live in a land so weird and changing that they assume that anything they are not looking at right this moment has ceased to exist. This is how I feel about itemisation in EQ2 right now. My crafted gear was quite lovely on Thursday after the item revamp, perfect for a templar who likes getting stuck in with his hammer, but I just had another look at it and it has changed again! Apparently priests don’t get to have useful melee blue stats on their gear… (You can click the picture below for a full size version.)
OK, my dismay that it is becoming much harder for a priest to choose to play in a melee way aside, we need some consistency. I need to know that I’m going to wake up in the same gear I went to bed in. I do not understand, for the life of me, why the item revamp was allowed to go live. It was entirely known by all involved that things were not as they should be. I wonder what my equipment will do tomorrow. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it does not transmogrify into something squamous while I’m logged off, and crawl away. On a happier note, a lot of the looted and quested gear in the world has improved dramatically, and Maltheas has been having a lovely time running around finding it all for the first time! Some useful info from Smokejumper:
And that’s my biggest problem with how this has been done. An item revamp like this needs to be done all at once, or else you can’t make any sensible decisions as to what equipment to keep, and what to throw away. The Raiders, who are affected by small changes in gear far more than the likes of Maltheas, are going quite insane trying to figure out what is going on. Like those Chaos Waste folks, we are still in a land of flux, where Lord Everling’s signet ring can suddenly turn into a non-functional slashing weapon, equipment becomes invisible or changes appearance, and your favourite priest necklace lost all its wisdom. Let’s hope sanity returns to this land of confusion quickly. Update, with a picture I want to use on the forum. This picture illustrates the absolute soullessness of the new gear. Give me the level, archetype, quality, and slot, and I can tell you exactly what the stats of the item will be. EQ2’s Game Update 61 (scheduled for Tuesday 23rd of August Update: and delayed til Thursday 25th!) brings with it an item revamp for level 20-90. Intrigued, Maltheas stepped into Zoltoon’s patented Chronobarrel, to see what would be in store. For future events such as these will effect us in the future. EQ2’s itemisation has been amiss ever since the Stat Revamp rendered all but two stats useless for every class. There has also been a gradual inflation in item power that has left items from launch areas desperately poor compared with items of the same level from newer areas. So then, the Item Revamp is badly needed, and I rejoice in its arrival. If it is done right, that is! The Item Revamp is a work in progress on the test servers right now, but as I always say, we can only look at what is, not at what might be later, so lets have at it! Many existing items appear unchanged, while others have been updated with new stats, sometimes even leaping from treasured to legendary. I don’t mind too much either way, as some of the fun will be exploring and finding wondrous new gear. Part of me does suddenly have buyer’s remorse about quest rewards which can never now be re-attained, especially as Maltheas has largely done any quests with rewards he’ll be able to use any time soon. Even if the items were being updated, it would not help matters, as they’d have been transmuted for being rubbish a long time ago! It’s hard to see how this effect could have been avoided, so Maltheas shall bear it bravely and seek out fine new equipment! Crafted gear has all been retroactively boosted. Test-Malth’s crafted armour upgraded quite nicely, in fact! The yellow number is from the adornments he has plugged in, rather than being part of the item. Original is on the left, and revamped is on the right.  Everquest 2 - Crafted Gear in the Item Revamp
To check out how loot has changed, I swang over to Runnyeye, via the Enchanted Lands. While in the Enchanted Lands, I took the opportunity to knock off a few nameds that I expected would be up on such a quiet server. Chomper, The Sludge Creep, and the Essence of Darkness fell to Rodcet’s light. The results were interesting:  Some Loot from the Enchanted Lands Named Monsters Each dropped at least a legendary piece. It has a very obvious feel of having been algorithmically generated, lacking some of the flavour of the old drops. The Essence of Darkness did drop the Wicked Cutthroats chain Leggings of Pure Darkness, but I’m not sure if the name was pure coincidence or not. The druid-only plate bracers from Chomper were rather disturbing. Nothing, be it algorithm or designer, should have created such a monstrosity. I hope there’s not too much gear like that. Do they all have their own loot tables still, or is it shared across the zone, or even tier? Only one way to find out, with another round of beating up the same beasties. Just as soon as they get around to respawning. Research! That’s how we roll around here! Aha! The Sludge Creep dropped the Fiendish Fateseer’s Spaulders of Acumen again. This is good, as bosses should have some degree of predictability in what they drop. I hope he does have a few more drops, and I just happened to get lucky there. The Essence of Darkness drops some Unyielding Veteran’s Legplates of the Stalwart, so I’m reckoning that the darkness in the name of his last drop was sheer synchronicity. Chomper drops some legendary cloth wrists, Spellbound Prodigy’s Cuff’s of Focus, this time usable by all classes. Anyhows, that was a small sample of overland heroic bosses. I have a whole lot of Legendary drops. Seems adorners may well find getting their higher end ingredients a little more easy going forward. Delving into Runnyeye, I rejoiced to see that the Clay Insurgent still dropped the Clay Band of Subterfuge, in a new updated form,and no longer restricted to scouts, not that anyone else would really wear it. This is far more how I hoped things would work out. Mudslinger, however, was only carrying an Adept book, which did not seem right at all. Perhaps his drops got missed in all of this. As only the second Runnyeye named I slew, that was a little bit worrying. On a second slaying, Mudslinger was a bit more generous and gave up the legendary Muddite Limb of Beating, which also seemed to be an up to date item. So, from this small sample it seems that Runnyeye’s boss drops have kept their flavour. Hopefully that applies to all other dungeons too.  Mudslinger and the Clay Insurgent are generous hosts. Brief Thought: The simple + Ability Modifier seems to have been phased out for new gear, with Potency in its stead. Do they stack, and is Potency capped? Might be worth keeping keeping some +Ability gear around, just in case. Overall, I think the Item Revamp will be beneficial. It’s long overdue, and might lead to a little more action in some of the excellent older content. I’m not too comfortable with the generic feel of much of the gear though. It would be good to know if there are still items with interestingly unique properties and procs out there. Something that does make me bitterly unhappy is that Heritage Quest rewards have not been improved. I spoke about how badly they had been left behind in a previous post, but with the new competition, they are so bad that it is almost funny. Heritage Quests are supposed to be some of the most epic and meaningful quests in the game, and it is desperately important that the rewards are brought up to scratch (and purchasable from Shady Swashbuckler, as usual for Heritage rewards). The other thing I thought needed updating in that post were the Qeynos and Freeport T3 armour quests. Doesn’t look like that gear has been updated either. There’s still some time before this is due to go live at the end of August, so perhaps they may yet feel the magical touch of GU 61’s Item Revamp! Tune in next time, when I weep bitter tears over what the AA Revamp is going to do to poor Maltheas! “Bah, hospitals! Who needs ’em?”, said old man Stanton. Luckily, there was someone there to set him straight before he started quoting Ayn Rand again.  Fact-checking is so 1950's. |
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