All my hardwork undone! D:

The latest update removed the alchemical rituals from my Icy Raiments. I sure hope they come back! It's not a huge deal -- it's more like chrome on a caddy. A vanity thing.

Lord March quests

The new f2p quests are great. I'm especialy impressed by how each quest is it's own mini-adventure that transitions from scene to scene. Some of the older quests are very mono-thematic, you go into the trog dungeon and you find an entire dungeon of trogs. But these new quests move around alot. They're still based around a theme but theres more transition. For example, the quest Frame Work is about infiltrating a castle, but theres the surrounding countryside, sneaking into the castle, and the big boss fight. Each one is clearly distinguished by the scenery and style of gameplay. Bravo Turbine!

Also of note, I think Turbine has a new engine under the hood that allows them to have more combatants. I really enjoyed having crowds of enemies to fight. Usualy mobs of that magnitude don't happen unless I've got DA. It was cooll to have DDO drop twenty wolves on me like it was no big deal.

Supposedly, the next part of this quest is premium content, so the f2p is part of an eeeevil plan to advertise and earn money. I say bring it on! I like what I see in this 'freeview.'

Con Opp is good

I still don't have a good sense of how much this thing procs, but I never run out of mana. In fact, I often find that I'm 'wasting' mana by running around with a full blue bar. I'm very happy with Con Opp so far, I plan to run tests as soon as I stop having so much fun.

[my first time] Hot off the altar of Destruction!

Concordant Opposition helm with all SP enhancements +1 Int / +2 Cha / +3 Cha. I immediately ran out the gates of Meridia to the ratswarm by the ramp. The ConOpp procs fast enough that I ended up with a Hp/Mp profit. I dunno if it will be the gamechanger I hoped for against tougher foes who hit for more damage, but I can forsee a huge savings in time and money spent wandwhipping. Also, this allows me to scrap my Wis +6 ML 13 helmet. The Minimum Level on the ConOpp helm is only 11!

+1 Greater heart of wood -- for me??!?

So there I was,  Running with the Devils on normal and in that teeny-tiny treasure chest in the stone gazebo? I found... a +1 greater heart of wood.

Now I'm trying to figure out what to do with it. Here are my plans so far:

1. Brag to everyone I meet and spam my guild chat about it Done! and fun too.

2. Sell it. Gah! Everyone is interested but no one has platnum, or scales. It's an army of beggars! I know we dwarves are greedy and all but seriously, I'm not gonna sell this +1 GHoW for peanuts. (Anyone else on Orien and got plat? :D )

3. Reincarnate now! I could get Metamagic: quicken for heals and reshuffle my skills to get some Open lock to bypass the Giant on Epic! Von2.

3. Reincarnate later. In theory, If I got all my purchased content to Elite, I'd have enough to unlock champion 32 point characters plus another 100 favor to spare. And I've got enough TP that I'm ready to buy somethin when it goes on sale.  So I'd have all the skill and feat reshuffling from 2) and also some extra build points. Shazam! Only downside there is that I'll probably have my TR token BEFORE I grind out the favor from 1600 to 1750. Doesn't make much sense to spend two hearts (+1 greater, and then True) so close together.

4. Save it for later. A waste of a perfectly good bankslot if you ask me, but also insurance for if I accidentaly click the wrong trainer or somethin.

So assuming I don't find a buyer, I guess I'll plan on grinding out 1750 favor and upgrade Doomstone from 28 to 32 points. Then I'll level up my other slot with something pug friendly, just in case Mabar (or something like it) rolls around before I get Doomstone up to 20 again.

Ah well, I wish all my problems were this fun. :D

Requiescat in pace Mabar.

Well that was fun. I spent a week of play and an Epic! Token, but I've gained two cloaks and a level 9 nimbus wand. Why two cloaks? My Epic! cloak has a guard on it and my level 12 cloak is puppy safe. I haven't had a chance to try out the nimbus wand, but I think it will be a hoot on Korthos when I TR.

My favorite Mabar memory was when I pulled a win out of the jaws of certain doom. The caster at our lever died and it fell upon me, the fast ranger with a pos pos greensteel clickie, to sprint over and save him. Except that he was gone so I had to singlehandedly fight off the Night Gargoyles. Which again, was certain doom, until a caster sprinted over to save me. :D

Dragontouched leather armor

Looking forward to TR and some new adventure packs, I'm thinking of getting some leather Dragon touched armor because it works with Evasion and Dex in the mid 20s. The other options are the robe and outfit DT, but those only excell for Dwarves with more than 34 Dex.
Originaly I was gonna skip DT for some other content, but I hear that soon we'll be able to customise the colors on DT, and that makes DT very attractive. No pun intended.

Epic! VoN

I got epic debuffs. I wear the plate of destruction from HoX. It makes it so that anyone who attacks me gets -4 AC. Then I hit em with my Improved destruction for -8 AC that stacks. In my off hand I have an Improved Curse / Shattermantle to mess up their saves.

Those are all good and I love em for epics. But after they're proced, I'm not sure what to do next. I've got some Tenderizers that stun the mobs, but they never ever work against the red names as far as I can tell. I have an Improved Roaring that hits, but doesn't last very long. I also have some puncturing and other stat drainers, but they hit the Epic! debuffing limit pretty quick.

Not sure what to do next, I've got about 30 larges but I'm not sure what to craft. I feel ok with my current build, but I'm looking foward to TRing and getting rogue skills with the extra points.

New char: Twinkyzerger

So I've named my Turbine Point farmer "Twinkyzerger" in hopes of attracting vet TRs who want to escape Korthos ASAP. If nothing else, it will scare away the noobs who hate me and my 60,000 plat worth of twinky gear:

+1 Pure Good greataxe of flames. Only a tiny bit better than the starter axe.

+2 Adamantium Full Plate. This is great because so much Korthos stuff only hits for 3 points of damage but still interupts opening doors and pulling levers.

+3 returning throwing axe. For slimes. I don't want those grey oozes anywhere near my gear.

70 cure light wounds. I don't use them that often on the Korthos stuff, but I often get sidetracked by some group doing a higher level quest that I fondly remember and need heals for.

The Epic content in DDO is on sale.

So I've been enjoying running around as a level 20 ranger with a two level fighter dip, but I've got no Epic content. I've been finishing off the last couple of points of favor to buy Vale of Night when suddenly... there's a sale on VoN!!!

Now my only hope of snagging that sweet sweet 25% discount is somehow getting the last 75 turbine points before the sale ends. I've been speed-running Korthos for TP, but I don't think I can make it at this rate. The other option is to grind four points of favor on my Wizard, but whenever I log in Sarlona is dead dead dead, and anyway that character has already done leet for everything in sight.

It's gonna be realy close either way.

Free to play and Level 20

My free to play character is level 20 and lovin it! :D

He's a Dwarf Tempest III Ranger 18 / Fighter 2 specializing in Dwarf Axes and heavy armor. Currently I'm wearing Plate of the Defender from VoD. It's mithral and a perfect fit for my current Dex. Soon I hope to get Tharne's Bracers and then I'll use fighter and dwarf enhancements to accomidate the extra AC.

Anyway, I'd like to say thanks to Turbine and the Defenders Guild. This is some of the best Videogaming Ive ever had. :D

New character! :)

I've installed the high resolution DDO pack. Everything looks the same, except better! I notice it most in the buffs.

Anyway, this new character is my fifth rogue. First one I didn't enjoy playing. Second one had an awesome randomly generated face but didn't qualify for Tempest . The next two had sub-awesome faces. But the fifth time is the charm!

I'm enjoying the playstyle. The ability to wand-whip and fight reminds me of my paladin. Oh! And the ability to shoot stuff at long range is quite the eye-opener. It's fun to run towards my target shooting my bow and killing the target before I get there. :)

Long term plan is to take rogue all the way and enjoy being a jack of all trades master of none.

Buggy enhancements kill character :(

UPDATE: It was the fault of the Turbine Updater. Turbine fixed the bug. All is well :)

My character is bugged. I've stopped playing him until Turbine fixes the bug.

The problem is that the Spellsinger enhancement class isn't available. Not that I haven't met a prereq or something. Spellsinger doesn't exist as far as my character is concerned. The other bard prestige classes (virtuoso and warchanter) show up on the list as unavailable but the Spellsinger prestige class is missing completely. :(

I've submitted some bug reports but I doubt that Turbine will ever fix it. DDO seems like a good game but one where the bugs are fixed infrequently (if ever!) I mean, I do enjoy DDO but I've never played a buggier game and this latest update has made the game less stable for me. I get crashes from solid fog now (a bug since day one) and there's lag in the harbor. The ice games got closed for bugs, and so on.

I hope that it's just Turbine getting back into the swing of things but to be honest it's shaken my long term hopes for DDO.

[Gwylan's Blade] Too fragile

So, I don't know what the deal is with the G-Blade but it always gets damaged. I bound it to char to spare myself the heartbreak of permadamage. But seriously, it's annoying to have it be the only thing in my inventory to be all busted up whenever I finish a quest. I'm looking into doing an adamantine ritual to make it durable. From what I can tell, Ademantine ore is found in the stormsomething mines in the anvil fire inn in house D. I tried soloing it but trying to fight all the monarch scorpions. Do-able but not in a fun way. I'll be back with my peeps.

My first time: *THE PIT*

I heard THE PIT is an impossibly difficult cluster-flumph of a dungeon -- the sort of thing that only inmates running an asylum would cook up.
And yeah, I died twice. Both times it was an impossibly long fall into a deep chasm. (I don't know if I've mentioned it on this blog but DDO has the best use of vertical spaces ever. Try diving to the base of the water tower in the third part of STK and tell me that isn't creepy!) Anyway, I died twice by falling the farthest I've ever fallen in any game AND landing in hot lava AND ALSO huge oozes.
But both times I got rescued, and I was able to help out by charming the super-trogs and casting feather fall and detect door at opportune moments.
Anyway, I had a blast. I'm definitely looking forward to running THE PIT again. And this time I'm not leaving without my MuckDOOM.

Alert! Bard-honor besmirched!

"A Bard? Bards are l33+ /sarcasm" Now you've done it. Now it's ON!
I turned Archer-point into a sea of purple hatted fratricide. To my brothers in arms I was permahaste incarnate. But woe and normal speed betide all who eschewed my bardly commands to gather 4 haste.

Now that said, I'm glad I didn't run into a scorpion because I've got basicaly nothing on scorps, spiders and oozes. But in Archer point there's nothing I can't do.

Oh, and due to a slight miscommunication I finished out before they tackled the optional. (They had a TPK save one  without me! :p)

G-blade! [Gwylan's stand]

I got G-blade! It's a fairly common named item that drops in Gwylan's Stand but it has a unique feature. It has a +2 enhancement bonus to perform. Notice that it's an *enhancement* bonus so it stacks with everything except another G-blade.
Also, it's a longsword so my Drow weapon prof covers it. :D

Otto's resistable dance

I joined a pickup group for part 4 of Waterworks. Everyone seemed really happy with my bard. In big fights, I'd try to time it so that my warsong would proc right when we hit the battle lines. Then I'd leap over the battle line (I'm not much of a jumper but kobolds are easy to leap over) and chase down the casters, ogres, or even an orange name! My party would run up behind me taking care of the dancers and saving the facinated mobs 'til last. 

At level four, I'm thinking of getting sleep. Sleep works against hit dice so it won't be useful against higher level content but sleep makes the mobs fall unconcious and unconcious means they receive auto crits. Sleep is a one  hit Hold monster.

New character, new spell

With my new Bard I chose Otto's resistable dance instead of Charm person.

I was unhappy with charm person. It's a great spell in theory but in practice it's a hastle. The charmed persons are so fragile and harmless it's easier to just whack them with my medium BAB and -1 STR mod. What's worse, in the only Korthos combat that has any use for CC (Misery's peak, against the swarm of cultists on the ice stairs) my charmed persons woke up the facinated crowds.

I'm much happier with the replacement spell Otto's resistable dance. The target keeps dancing even after getting struck. The animation is fun to watch. The range is very short though so I'll have to get used to that. I've got to break my Cleric habits of being able to cast at distant targets.

Since these spells are new to me, I'm going to eschew Charm person for Suggestion. Looks more useful since it works on more than just persons. Shorter durration but once it takes effect there's no save to snap out of it early. Should make it more predictable and longer lasting in those rare cases I get a lucky roll against a high Will target.

Twinking level one

Although I was excited to play my new Bard, I was not so excited about running the Korthos stuff again -- especialy since I just finished running it the previous bard. So I twinked.

It was really easy actualy. I logged in with Fietor (Cleric 7) bought stuff from the auction house and mailed it to Darkbad. I sent myself a +2 sword, a flame something robe and a mithral shield (no arcane failure)! As it turns out the sword and shield are level two, so in my first solo quest I was stuck fighting empty handed. It was slow going and I would have lost except for the twink robe. As it turns out, it wasn't flame resistance, it was a flame counter-attack. Whenever anyone hits me, they get counter-attacked for 1d4 fire damage. All I had to do was take out the casters and then let the melees kick against the goad. Well that and not run out of HP. Luckily, I took Cure Light Wounds as my first spell so it was easy enough to survive the Collaborator. Partway through I pulled a dagger from a treasure chest and equiped it. No noticable change in damage.

 

 

But, now that the quest is done I'll have a Monsterous humanoid bane sword to play with. I know that for the first couple of levels the mobs get cleared so quickly it doesn't make sense to use my song on them. But I'm really looking forward to putting Fascinate on those troll and bugbear armies in Redwillow's ruins.

CharGen: Darkbad

Darkbad is my first real attempt at Bard. I gave him a 20 Charisma since CHA is a Bard's only casting statistic. I gave him an Intelligence of 14 so he can have more skills and a chance at unlocking those INT runes that no one in my pickup groups can ever seem to pry open. The rest goes into Constitution so he can survive combat.

For skills (8=6+2) I'm maxing out Perform, Concentration, Diplomacy, Haggle, Use magic device, Sneak, Move silently and using the rest (1 pt per level) to grab some jump, spot, ballance and tumble.

RIP Xeroic

I deleted  my first attempt at a bard. The problem with Xeroic ( pronounced /Zero-ic/ ) is that too many players pronounced his name like there was a 't' between 'r' and 'o'.

Also, I made INT a dump stat because I forgot about Concentration. So farewell Xeroic, we barely knew ye!

Bards rock? Who knew!

So last week I was running a Cleric through Stormcleave and I was very impressed by a Bard. He zerged ahead hypnotizing and facinating everything. The highlight was when he imprisoned a Giant Boss behind a wall of facinated black skeletons. All we had to do was follow along and pick them off one by one.

Anyway, I was so impressed by bards, I decided to start one of my own!