Dungeons and Dragons Online

[Garryl]

I've been trying out DDO lately. I've pretty much exhausted the free to play content with my level 14 Ranger on Cannith, who has no trouble soloing level 16-17 quests on Hard with a merc, and level 14 and under on elite. I'm kind of done with the game, at least for solo play, but if anyone else is also playing, I'd be interested.

[SorO_Lost]

Hey, I didn't even know you were on. Can you PM me your name in game?

And lv16~17 quests? You should have saved them but it sounds like you probably completed Spinner so did you already go over to Eveningstar and cleared Wheloon's pre-quests too? You're kind of at the end of free, there is a lv18 in the Inspired Quarter but you should have saved up your Turbine Points and picked up something like the Vale, GH, or Necro4. A single, 1st-server, character can collect up to 1,350 Turbine Points for free (but some of those are form epic quests) and while GH I think runs for 850 (plus sale/coupon discounts!). You just have to avoid the urge to trivially spend TP on stuff.

[phaedrusxy]

I broke down and bought (with real $) the Delara's Graveyard set of quests, but now I'm kind of bored with the game... lol. Cleric is level 9, but only really good for grouping (works OK to solo if I hire a mage or barbarian, though). I have a rogue 2/wiz 6 that's OK for soloing that I ran through the graveyard stuff with, but... I'm just not feeling it lately.

My 9 year old son saw me playing and started playing some with me. I made another cleric to run around with his rogue/ranger. They're level 3 so far, but we don't play much, and when we do I think I'd rather it just be he and I, at least for now...

[SorO_Lost]

I broke down and bought (with real $) the Delara's Graveyard set of quests,

The +5% xp drop there is nice, but the final quest is also good for farming if you have a party that can split up and handle both wings but you have to window farm* it.

*Have all but one recall out, then have someone grab the quest window. Final guy recalls out forcing the instance to reset. Anyone with the currently active window will get booted into a new instance even if they could not normally open the quest again.

but now I'm kind of bored with the game... lol.

It's why I cycle in and out of it. I'm not the best at MMO repetition, or like today all I did was hold left click and move the mouse around while getting distracted in real and since it took like 10 mins a run is wasn't the best quest.

My 9 year old son saw me playing and started playing some with me. I made another cleric to run around with his rogue/ranger. They're level 3 so far, but we don't play much, and when we do I think I'd rather it just be he and I, at least for now...

Awww you're such a good parent. Well protective at least, I got a feeling mine will invent new curse words when they play. >.>

[Garryl]

Hey, I didn't even know you were on. Can you PM me your name in game?

And lv16~17 quests? You should have saved them but it sounds like you probably completed Spinner so did you already go over to Eveningstar and cleared Wheloon's pre-quests too? You're kind of at the end of free, there is a lv18 in the Inspired Quarter but you should have saved up your Turbine Points and picked up something like the Vale, GH, or Necro4. A single, 1st-server, character can collect up to 1,350 Turbine Points for free (but some of those are form epic quests) and while GH I think runs for 850 (plus sale/coupon discounts!). You just have to avoid the urge to trivially spend TP on stuff.

My DDO account name is Garryl1234 (so original, right?). On Cannith, my Ranger's name is Kevork.

I haven't spent any DDO store points yet. I know I've gotten the once-per-server 100 points for 50 favor on 4 of the servers, but I don't know the exact amount I actually have accumulated.

What exactly do you mean by "saving" the quests? It's not like I've been skipping over the ones before them. Aside from a couple of tedious and annoying quests like The Pit, I've done all of the quests up to level 12 or so up through Elite, along with most of the rest through to 14. Actually, I should revise my earlier statement. I think I actually stopped soloing elite difficulty around level 12, not 14. I think the stopping point was when I got 1-shot by an Ice Flenser's Polar Ray for about 10% over my max health in Invaders!. But, yeah, I did Spinner and the FR quests on normal, and I think a couple of them on hard. I was getting game fatigue at that point, so I kind of rushed through them a bit just to see what was so special about FR in the game.

I don't know how other classes wind up, but my Ranger feels really strong, and always has since pretty close to the beginning (maybe level 4 or so). I calculated that I'm doing somewhere between 150 and 200 DPS with my bow, and I haven't included the effects of things like Sniper Shot, Merciful Shot, Manyshot, multi-target from Improved Precise Shot, etc. in there.

[phaedrusxy]

My Cannith characters are:
Ulfdag (dwarven cleric 9)
Tymlin (halfling rogue 2/wizard 6)
and Meilchor (human cleric 3)

[SorO_Lost]

What exactly do you mean by "saving" the quests?

Because of how the mechanics work, you need to do quests at and just below your level several times. Skipping ahead works out to a penalty in the long time because throwing potential xp gains away when you have a limited amount of packs lowers the ceiling you can reach.

Like you're level 14 in the first quest the Lords of Dust and we'll count Aggression (+10%) & Ransack (+15%) in things too.
On Normal the base xp is 5,100, optionals (excluding rare spawn) are 510xp, 765xp, & 510xp, total 6,885xp.
On Hard the base xp is 5,300, optionals (excluding rare spawn) are 530xp, 795xp, 530xp, total 7,155xp.
On Elite the base xp is 5,500, optionals (excluding rare spawn) are 550xp, 825xp, 550xp, total 7,425xp.
First run ever is Normal you'll get +25% for Normal & say +20% for Daily for +11,704xp then immediately running Hard next will give you a +40% for Hard & -25% for Level Difference for +10,017xp. The two runs were worth 21,721xp.

But if you waited until you were level 15, Hard would have given +11,805xp (or +13,236xp if you also waited a day to rerun) for an "extra" three thousand xp by just playing the game as intended. It's not much, but Dust gives the lowest amount of xp out of all of them and you ran six quests too soon. I suspect your losses are somewhere around 25,000xp, maybe 30k (excluding running them 'right').

so I kind of rushed through them a bit just to see what was so special about FR in the game.

FR was the first expansion for DDO, everything else was updates, and it was a pretty large drop on the community.

Fan bonuses included stuff like access to FR, Eliminster, and so on. Mechanically, besides all the typical fixes, the entire range of content was sold as an expansion which cheaper than buying the separate components through the DDO store. In all you get fifteen new quests, technically four explorers and one of which used a new Encounter system to replace the old standard of simply using red named monsters. Four new Challenges were added as well. Epic Progression was a huge focus as well, the level cap changed from 20 to 25, quests previously simply had a "Epic" difficulty level gained a Epic Normal/Hard/Elite scale, and Epic Destinations were added. And the Druid Class was added too.

I don't know how other classes wind up, but my Ranger feels really strong, and always has since pretty close to the beginning (maybe level 4 or so). I calculated that I'm doing somewhere between 150 and 200 DPS with my bow, and I haven't included the effects of things like Sniper Shot, Merciful Shot, Manyshot, multi-target from Improved Precise Shot, etc. in there.

Bow-focused Rangers have a ton of survivability and the damage seems utterly amazing if you play in a vacuum.

I'm not too sure what to say on how to expand your expectations, how about I've seen five digit numbers on a couple different characters of mine?