Enter the Forgotten Realms

More MotU

Despite my doomsaying, I actualy got alot of DDO time. After my daughters' birthday party they got tired and fell asleep early. As did my wife, who was exhausted from an epic vegan cake fail. And so it was that after I finished scrubbing the insoluble pink cake ring off of our tub, I traveled to Forgotten Realms.

Last time I got a bunch of XP towards Level 21 but not toward my Epic Destiny. I can't tell you how much that buged me to see all that XP going to waste. And so I started up a LFM for "Into the Rift."

Eight seconds later my soul was weary from an eternity of waiting. I changed the LFM to "IP" and charged in with naught but a hireling to aid me. What a mixed bag that quest was. On one hand the scenery is spectacular. Not only is each setpiece great, they're arranged in a spectrum to convincingly present the illusion that you're going on an epic journey. But on the otherhand the combat was absolutely terrible.

Supposedly there was a bug (which was addressed in the latest hotpatch) that makes the difficulties wrong. So even though I selected "casual" for speed, I ended up slogging through epic level mobs. Not that it was dangerous for my self-healing tank-wannabe, but it took forever because my DPS is no match for Epic HP.

It worried me because I've always enjoyed DDO's combat. A while ago, the awesomeness of DDO's combat was guarenteed by Vorpal weapons. Whenever the Devs put too many hitpoints on a mob, whenever clearing trash became a chore, whenever undergeared characters started a land war in Asia, whenever someone went in against a Scilian when death was on the line, the vorpal blades went "snicker snack" and in a blue flash the drudgery died. But now, post vorpal-nerf I'm afraid DDO will be overrun by lazy developers and HP-fat mobs.

Anyway, after the great scenery and hateworthy gameplay of Into the Rift, I got Paladin fatespun. Kinda dumb, since I just wrote about how I need more DPS but it's handy for tanking, which I've enjoyed lately.

Then out into the Kings Forest. Everyone says it's massive, but I had no idea how big this wilderness area really is. I spent hours running around and really enjoyed it. Lousy XP and loot but lots of fun.

Then I went back to house K and ran some Epics. I felt like those were too safe also. I couldn't DPS the mobs, and they couldn't hurt me. Perhaps I don't like the tanking experience?

And then to rub it in, I joined a Stealer of Souls. A couple people failed to flag (after promising otherwise) and so we ended up doing a two-man run on casual. We had alot of trouble DPSing the giants and so although we finished the quest, we ran out of RL time fighting Sorjek.

So, I dunno. My main is a good team player, tanking bosses and gathering trash, but the DPS makes soloing and shortmanning a chore. That lousy DPS overshadows all the upgrades to an otherwise great expansion pack.