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.
I don’t tend to write a lot about World of Warcraft, only having played it for a month or so in its first year. Still, as the biggest MMO by far, what happens over there matters, as you’ll generally see it happening 6 months later everywhere else. So it is with WoW’s new RealID.
Essentially, your real name (or at any rate, the real name you gave when you signed up years ago, having no idea that it would later be made public), is going to be made public. Your real name is now visible to WoW plugins, and will also be used when you post on the forum. Not having WoW, I’m a little vague on the exact technicalities, but that’s the general gist.
What’s bothering me most though, as is so often the case, is the response from the public. As usual in these situations, you have the people who are concerned, and you have the people who are calling the first group “chicken littles” because the issue does not personally affect them.
There are a lot of reasons why someone might not want to use their real name on the internet, or in WoW. Some of those reasons are good. I’m not going to list them, because anyone with an ounce of empathy for their fellow human beings should be able to think of several. I might also suggest that the simple fact that WoW players were not told that this information would be made public if they signed up at any point before this month ought to be reason enough to make this an outrageous breach of privacy.
An awful lot of folks out there in the blogosphere consider the loss of anonymity to be a good thing. Mostly because they, personally, have no need for it. They hope that it will lead to greater civility on the forums, and perhaps it will. That would be a pleasant side-effect of a diminishing of freedoms, in a similar way to how removing the right to free speech would quieten down all those annoying opposing views, or how ending the right to strike would make the trains more punctual.
What it comes down to is that it is much easier to give up the freedoms other people find important, than the freedoms you find important for yourself. But here’s the thing. If you start giving up every freedom that only a minority of people find useful, very soon you start finding you don’t actually have very many left. Giving a corporation the right to tell everybody what your real name is, when you did not agree to that, is not something, looking at the wider picture, that I think is good for the future of the internet. We are the owners of our personal information; not Blizzard.
I don’t need to preserve my anonymity, but some people do, and for good reasons, and that is all that is required for me to oppose RealID.
I saw this for the first time earlier while watching some MSNBC online, which likes to give me US advertising, and felt compelled to track it down to show you.
Nice timing on your advert, Charmin Ultra. If there’s anything that America needs to see more of at the moment, it is fish flopping around in brown muck. Who needs wetlands anyway?
Maybe you could donate a few tonnes of your amazingly absorbent tissue to clean up the blasted oil.
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.
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.
