Last night, I kind of "attended" the first edition of "Syp's" Massively DDO night. The air quotes are because I accidentally blundered off to do something else and because the event did not include the advertised quantity of Syp due to arrival of new baby. (Grats Sypster!)
What does "static group" mean again?
In the absence of everyone's favorite Bio Breaker, one poor Massively editor was left to wrangle a 32 member guild on his own. Rubi did as well as he could under the circumstances, but it seemed like an occasion to take a little initiative. I said oh hai to Ethic from Kill Ten Rats, and then I saw one of the Massively guild ("OnedAwesome") say they were looking for more, so I joined in.
It turned out that the group in question was a group of normal players who happen to have picked up a couple of us just by virtue of being in the right/wrong place at the time. This was fine, even great, because it was a good team that was fun to play with.
Unfortunately, being a noob to the DDO chat interface, I clicked the chat panel over to "party" because I couldn't figure out how to make my chat go to party by default on the general tab. What I didn't realize until an hour later was that this would effectively mute my guild chat. As a result, I never saw the chat messages indicating that the plan was to deal with the first few quests in town, pose for a picture, and call it a night.
In the absence of instructions to the contrary, I figured it was "move at your group's pace" night. Thus, Massively called their night at level 2 and just outside of town, while my group powered through the entirety of Korthos Island on both hard and elite, ending up at level 3 and reaching Stormreach harbor. Ooops?
WTB New Starting Area
I've actually played through the early town quests about 8 times by now. This is relatively typical of my early days in a new MMO, since I like to try a variety of character types to see what I like before committing to a main. As long as I was auditioning characters, I figured I might as well switch servers to claim more server first Turbine Point awards - I've claimed the 5 favor award on all seven servers, and, with the Massively festivities, have reached 50 favor on two servers for a grand total of 450 "earned" Turbine Points to date.
On a personal level, I could really stand to see an extra starting area at this point. DDO literally only offers the one set of questlines (with the upshot being that I've now got enough practice to re-roll and catch up to the Massively group in under an hour if I wanted to). For an event like this one, I can see the merits of this approach, as it theoretically ensures that everyone will be in the same location for grouping. (There was some way to screw up and wind up in "snowy" Korthos instead of "Sunny" Korthos, but that didn't seem to bug me any.)
On the other hand, if Turbine added a new level 1-2 zone to the Turbine Point store - specifically so that free to play players could stay in the current experience to find groups, while veterans seeking variety would have an alternate path, I'd pay the Turbine points without question.
Trial of the Wizard
As long as I was going through the starting areas yet again, I figured that I might as well try a Wizard, a class that was very low on my priority list due to poor solo capacity. This seemed like less of a handicap for a character I was making specifically for grouping.
Unfortunately, the low level DDO wizard is probably the most useless I've ever felt in a MMORPG group. At level 2, my main damage spell hit for 4-10 damage, and I could use it about 20 times before running out of mana. Level 1 mobs seem to have about 20 HP, and it seems like the game provides a rest shrine for recovering your spell points approximately once every 15 mobs. I was literally doing better DPS by swinging a rapier with barely any strength, and the rapier never runs out of spell points. (I picked the Drow race, cause we all know how much Syp loves Elves, and all Drow are proficient in rapiers.)
In fairness, this aspect of playing a caster comes out of the 3.5e DND ruleset (which is actually even more restrictive on casters). If things are implemented correctly, the class will eventually be able to absolutely cripple foes with debuffs and unleash devastating alpha strike nuke spells on bosses to make up for having to hang back on trash mobs. I might even give the Wizard another chance whenever I pay to unlock the Warforged (a race of bio-golems unique to the Eberron campaign setting - they get 50% healing from normal heals because of their golem side, but can also be healed by arcane magic, which means that a Warforged wizard can heal themselves between nukes). For now, though, this character is almost certainly going on the shelf.
DDO Grouping Experience
All miscommunication aside, my first time in a DDO group was actually a lot of fun. I was moderately familiar with the content, having seen all of it at least once, but it was still at least somewhat challenging to a full group with some newbies in tow when set to elite difficulty. (We did have three relatively more serious veterans, who probably could have carried the whole group if need be, but that may also be in part because these were newbie quests.)
I had not pictured myself actively working to spend more time in groups, since that's generally not my playstyle in other games, but I could see myself potentially spending the extra effort in DDO, if I find myself in the right type of community. Coming from a solo player like me, that means that DDO must be doing something right with its group game.
That wizard sounds crazy overpowered! My memories of first edition AD&D when I was in high school, you could take, say, Magic Missile as your spell - it did 2-5 damage. And cast it ONCE. That's it until tomorrow. Until then, stay out of combat, because even the weakest enemy is probably a 50/50 chance to instantly kill you with a single swing. And you're useless with your staff or dagger anyway.
ReplyDeleteThe damage doubled by level 2 because all DDO wizards get a robe that gives plus one caster level to level 1 spells during the tutorial (i.e. you get the second 2-5 damage missile at level 2 instead of level 3). They also get normal video game MMORPG spell points instead of having to prepare specific spells for specific slots.
ReplyDeleteOh, and you'd be shocked at HP totals because all DDO characters get 20 bonus HP at level 1 to try and keep the frequence with which players are one-shot by normal mob melee attacks down to a minimum. Also, the tutorial awards masterwork weapons with added elemental damage, which is why my Wizard can actually do melee damage that would be impressive by pen and paper standards (though melee characters do EVEN MORE).
The impression that I get, which may or may not be correct, is that loot settles back down to approximately normal DND levels at higher levels, but that they beefed it up for the tutorial to try and help the learning curve. The game supposedly gets much more difficult at level 4.
P.S. The irony is that 4th edition DND actually did add some sort of low magical damage free autoattack for Wizards. Apparently the overwhelming majority of minmax wizards were lugging around crossbows, and they felt that an infinite spell attack would actually be less damaging to the lore.
I soloed a Drow elf wizard up to 3, it's not as bad as you'd think. Niac's cold ray ftw (it's enough damage to murder almost anything you'll com across if they miss their save). That said, most of my solo work is on a Paladin these days.
ReplyDeleteWizards and sorcerers ARE overpowered, until the run out of mana, then they are "no powered".
ReplyDeleteAt level 2 you were using Magic Missile as your main damage spell, sounds like. It "says" 1d4+1 per missile, but is actually 1d2+3. That 1d10 on Niac's Cold Ray is actually 1d6+4 also. IOW, you never do less than half damage with a spell that connects.
ReplyDeleteAs you can see from that last paragraph also -- Niac's does significantly more damage than Magic Missile. At level 2 with the tutorial robe that gives the +1 effective level, Niac's is "officially" doing 3d10. Granted, some mobs have high reflex saves, and you do have to aim it manually, but you'll still hit about 80% of the time and those are 1-shot kills in all but a few rare instances.
Niac's makes wizard (or Sorcerer) a lot easier than MM does.
Mage Armor + Shield = 8 AC, so with dex bonus you could easily be at 19-21 AC all the time too, which is very sufficient on Korthos and in a lot of the lower end dungeons in Stormreach.
Biggest thing to worry about as a Drow wiz is to max out INT (yep, all the way to 20 -- makes your spells land more often), get a 10 STR (carry weight, not melee), CON 14, and you're pretty much golden.
At level 3 you get Web and then you can do the familiar "root + nuke" strategy. And at level 7 you get Fire Wall and you become a god.
But until then, yeah, it's a bit rough.
Yeah, it was kind of crazy. Sounds like a lot more people showed up than most expected. Which character were you? I was the inventively named "Pchild", Dwarven Barbarian. :)
ReplyDeleteYeah, DDO's chat interface leaves a lot to be desired. Given my experiences with LotRO, I expected things to be somewhat similar. Looks like each "pane" has a default output and input for chat. You can add more chat inputs (add guild chat to the party pane, for example), but it took a bit of poking to figure that out.
Otherwise, yeah, it seems that they captured a tiny bit of the pen-and-paper feel of D&D pretty well in the game. It was nice having a group. I might give another character a go next time (using my second "free" slot) to see how another character feels.
Great breakdown Mag.
ReplyDelete