f13.net

Xilren's Twin gives us his take on the still-in-beta Dungeons and Dragons Online from Turbine Entertainment (http://www.f13.net/index2.php?subaction=showfull&id=1135010041&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&).

Sounds a little like what NWN should have been.

Interesting.

Hmm, catassers are going to unhappy.
No end game?  That didn't work out so well with CoH.

I'm still scared to say anything, but some quick words:

[EDIT] :nda:


No, actually, I am. Forget what I said.

Not that scared then.

I wish they would've chosen Forgotten Realms as their first world instead of Stormreach. I don't know Stormreach, I don't care about Stormreach. Even Dragonlance I would've cared a bit more about.

Xil, I'm going to PM you a bug I found in the first stress test but forgot to submit.  I wasn't in the 2nd one more than a few hours and forgot to test it then and resubmit. ><

Umm other than that, no comment at this time since I'll wander off the  :nda: page.   Oh.. except one thing. 

Damnit, use less brown. 32 Million colors and all I saw was 124 shades of brown!!

Less brown would be good for sure.

I have had fun the few times I have played it, but I worry about burnout. Ideally I would like to see some sort of pay per play pricing available- get all my friends together for a weekend of questing, then pick it up again in a month or 2. If we could pay $ or $5 to play for a weekend or something, it might be worth it to schedule a get together (just like PnP).

Combat is still too fast, but the recent slowing is a step in the right direction. Would still much rather see a turn-based strategic combat system ala ToEE (sans the crippling bugs, of course).

This just further impresses upon me that I have to get this game to work.

Xilren this is an excellent article if I do say so myself.  I will say that this is the first game that has encouraged me and that I've let myself use WASD for and it's nice to actually have to utilize some form of thought while playing.

If this game works, and it stays decent I do believe I'll become a Turbine_FanGirl01 type player.

Nice article, said again.

I'm going to stick to my guns and say I would not pay $15/mo for this game.  This sounds like what NWN should have been, if DDO had the module creation tools that NWN did I would consider paying but the idea that devs will be able to keep up with the content that players tear through is just plain silly.  There are plenty of logical counter arguments to this position I know, but really I'm not going to cave to allowing subscriptions to seep into other genres/mediums.  Also no pvp = who cares for me, so its not like they are loosing a customer or anything.

*seriously that to was there in my head*

GAH!  :nda:  :x  :roll:

 :nda:

But I don't disagree with Hoax about paying $15 per month.

I've been in the beta for about a month now but have yet to find time to even install the game or register for the boards.  Damn you life!!!

Friday will probably be a good day for me to check it out.

I'll say a few things. If you are in the beta and have not tried it, you should. If for no other reason than to determine how engrained the MMOG Way to play games has become. You feel it in your very fingers when you start to play this game because it simply WILL NOT bend to that way of playing. Hardcore, catass MMOG'ers aren't going to get pissy about the "lack of content" because they'll have a conniption fit at the mechanics. It's subtle, but it's just that alien to them.

Also, I SUCK at this combat. I suck hard. It is quite possible to suck balls at this combat system, and I do. Copious amounts of balls. See above paragraph.

Yeah takes a bit of a mindset shift to remember 'oh right, I should be blocking/ dodging beacause this guy will WTFPWN me in just a few hits.'

Also, lest my previous comment be seen as an implication that I hate the game, I don't.  I'd rather see a model like Way was pining for, which is the exact model D&D has always been based around.  Buy an 'adventure' and run through it with your friends (or online PUGs if you are so brave).

 It's not a world, it's a game, and it IS D&D. (Which also will give the MMO Achievers shitfits because of the lack of uber item inflation.)

Well good - fuck those catasses in the face.

Dunno whats covered by the NDA and what's not in regards to this - but I'll chime in my 2 cents..

It's fun to see a "fresh" pve skillbased system - but its also the biggest flaw - computers really dont have anything to put up versus real players if you wanna keep it fair....

Well, it sounds like the type of game I can get together with friends on a planned night and run some online quests in. I like that idea. Games like WoW are great, but you always end up with people getting left way behind on the curve. This sounds more like something I can make a point of only playing casually.

I like new things. This sounds like it has some of what I like.

Good writeup so far, and I'll keep an eye on this now.

Yep.

I can only play games like Phantasy Star Online or Resident Evil Online. Anything more persitent and what happens? I log on after a week of absence to find all my friends are now 15 levels above me or will take 45 minutes of travel to even meet up with me. I really need a game where I can log in, run one mission, and log out.

So it sounds pretty good to me. The endgame? Roll a new class or unsubscribe. To me that's the endgame of every MMORPG anyway.

From the sound of it, this might be worth getting at launch, especially if I can get people to play with.

I wasn't really interested in DDO to begin with, just on the basis of it being yet another fantasy MMO.  I like what I'm hearing here though and I see they're offering some of the now typical extras with pre-order (10 day beta pass, +1 AC item, head start) so I'll probably be caving in.

http://www.ddo.com is referring to f13 as one of their "fansites", no less than 3 times on one page.  :-D

Er....


Hang on, does that makes us fanbois ?

AND we're listed under those gold selling money grubbing cockknobbling AIDS SPREADING ogaming people. Oh, and Warcry. As in Joe's turf. As in Themis' turf. As in a PR group.

Yes, that page could have been more thought out.

Pretty pointless of me to say anything after this point then, NDA or not. I wanted to burn ideas into everyone's minds before they played....But now that they gone and decided for themselves, my knowledge is right back to where it started: Useless. Wtf.

I'm a wee bit pissy.

Edit: Motherfuck! Does that actually say "Character customization in DDO is fun. My human female came complete with 30 different hairstyle choices?" Someone tell me I'm on drugs. Please. Someone. Anyone. Oh well, at least our sentence was the longest. Or something. Sigh.

DDO NDA is meant to go soon.  Glad about that, I wouldn't want anyone to think that the NDA is still in place purely to ensure only positive "Turbine approved" reviews make it into the public domain. 

That sure would be clever marketing though, I mean if anyone ever decided to do that.

Can anyone talk about how (or even if) an alignment system was implemented?  I was really hoping for the robust D&D alignment system, but someone indicated that it had been dumbed down to the old Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic scheme. 

I second the opinion that without large common areas, crafting, an economy, or pvp, its hard to imagine paying a monthly fee for this.  What exactly do you get for the fee?  Unless the actual implementation of combat and / or the dungeon / quests are a generation ahead of all other offerings, I don't see the draw. 

For my monthly fee, I expect Fun.


From the article, I expect I shall have it.


So, where do I preorder the game from, and what server you guys going to be on? :D

Ha! Good luck getting everyone on one server. *Dreads this*

Are the servers set up like a 'traditional' MMOG, ie: DAoC, WoW, CoH static servers?  Or more like PSO, GW universal lobbies to get groups together to do the instances?

D&D seems like an odd choice for a twitch-based game.  I mean, D&D itself was the epitome of "numbers vs numbers" combat.  I could see the combat system you describes as being fun, but I can't really see it feeling like D&D.

I haven't played D&D since 1.0, maybe the very beginning of 2.0.  But I read up on the 3.0-3.5 rules for NWN (and because I am a GIANT NERD).  The character building in modern D&D speaks loudly to the min-maxing-rules-lawyer-munchkin-whore deep in my soul.  Some of the threads I have seen about character builds are obscene (as in, resulting in extremely powerful characters that are also very un-intuitive).  Which leads me to this question: is there some way to re-spec in this game?  It seems very easy to gimp yourself, even by making ostensibly sensible choices.  And when the time comes to add high-level dungeons, you know deep down that Turbine will balance them around mim-maxers with +20 to hit rather than Joe Sixpack with +10.

I take it Clerics are still obscenely overpowered?

Are the social skills important?

When you say there are no tools for an economy, do you mean there is nothing like an auction house/bazaar, or do you mean that most gear is bind-on-pickup?

How does the loot feel?  Monty Haul-ish?

I echo the above re: FR, but I'd rather see Greyhawk.  Is there a good link somewhere for background on Eberron?  You can play a golem?  Hrmmm.

I am also dubious about paying a monthly fee for a Diablo/GuildWars-type game.  Especially with NWN2 supposedly coming out soon (anyone have any info on that?).

Then again, I know that I will buy and play this game for at least a while, because I do that with almost all of em :)

I don't think it's going to have "servers" as such. It'll be more like GW/CoH where the common areas all have multiple instances depending on how many people are online, and you can quickly switch to another instance of the common area like you do in GW, by a pulldown menu.

I don't think there is any gear that is bind on pickup or any of that stupid shit. But I don't know, I haven't really gotten any good gear. I know the starter gear can't be sold to vendors.

No respecs that I know of, but I haven't gotten very high. You pick your alignment, not sure what effect it has. See the "not gotten very high" comment.

Some of the articles that are linked from the same page we are on sound like they were written by gay pre-pubescent monkeys given typewriters and mice. I'm even more proud of Xilren's article now; he was able to make good coherent sentences that didn't sound like Hello Kitty lovegrams, and he actually talked about the game outside the tutorial.

I'm glad for the linkage and all, but we don't belong on a page called "Fansites" and we sure as fuck don't belong in the same page as people who talk about swinging at the air and magic missle at the darkness. Call me a snob, but there's some shitty writing on that page.

Well, at the end of the day if you don't like being a fansite, someone can write a counter article called 'D&D Online; Shite In A Box' and frontpage it too.

You know, for balance.

I'd try to write something about the dangers of subscription based revenue spreading to ALL games speaking in some kind of philosophical vague terms but that really is something I'm not qualified for.   Haemish on the other hand...    :thumbs_up:

But seriously the magic missile the darkness quote was the only one that did anything for me other then Xil's.  Because that movie was fucking hilarious.  Where are the Cheeto's!

There are some interesting concepts there.  Few levels and quick leveling are a plus, because that means their focus is going to have to be on quests not grind.  Good.  Not getting XP until completion of a quest?  I like that.  I don't think it's necessarily better or worse than the per-monster route, but should make the gameplay different.  Action oriented combat is a potential big plus.

Downside?  Apparently no other real content outside dungeons (city building or participation?  Home ownership?  What about building a magical research library?).  I also don't get a good impression of what the point might be after getting level ten.  Ok, so it doesn't take long to level, which means it's probably a fun trip up.  But if there is not much game outside the dungeons, what do you do when you don't need to go questing for xp?  Without much economy even getting rich doesn't appear to be much of a motivator since having a dozen Hand of Vecnas won't do me much good. 

Be nice if someone from Turbine wants to throw a beta my way too, btw.

Thanks for the feedback.  I tried to stick to actually gameplay relevance rather than "top 5 sexiest NPCs in DDO" (especially since SirBruce had beat me to it anyway :-p).

At any rate, do I think it's worth subbing to?  For me, sure.  It's different and fun so the lack of the "worldy" part doesn't bother me overmuch much the same way CoH appealed to me.  I dont play many crafter roles or game the auction houses anyway so missing those for me isn't saying much.  It's the 95% of time you spend fighting/questing that needs to be fun.

By way of comparison, my son still plays WoW so this past weekend I fired up my 40 rogue just to see what quests I still had on my log.  The "travel way over there and kill lots of gorillas until one drops the perfect piece of sinew.  Be warned, this will take a while.." one just reminded me that these really are very different gameplay experiences.  (I know, there are some good quests in WoW, there are just so many "kill X quests" in outdoor hunting areas...)

Xilren

Speaking as a big fan of virtual world and economy and city building type stuff... I think it's a good thing that they decided to leave these out altogether.  If SWG has taught me anything, it's that it's better to do one or two things and do them well than try to do twelve things and botch all of them at once.  At worst, the lack of worldy stuff means that I'll spend a few months getting a couple of characters to level 10, say "well, that was fun", and then unsub with no hard feelings.  Much better than hanging on to a shitty game for a year because you've invested too much into the world to leave it.

I find it most ironic that most every MMO out there has a D&D feel to it, EXCEPT DDO.

Anyway, played it a bit during the Penny Arcade Expo, was impressed, I think I met John Hanna without realizing it, probably gonna be picking this up if I got the income.

I have a friend whose major barrier into MMOs is the monthly subscription fee. I mentioned DDO to him and he practically peed his pants. Yeah, there's a non-MMO fanbase out there for DDO; let's hope this doesn't disappoint them.

I agree with you Samwise, that if any game dev (MMOG or otherwise) is going to put a feature in, it has to count as a feature.  Broken features make the whole game feel broke.  Nor am I asking for a UO-esque "...and the kitchen sink" approach.  My big question is, once you get to level 10, what's next?  What's the goal?  What's the hook to keep you playing?  It sounds like all they're offering to answer is "quest for the sake of quest", which doesn't seem like much.  XP and loot - the byproduct of quests - have little to no practical purpose after 10.  So what's left?

The answer might well be "roll up a new character" or "unsub".  That doesn't particularly bother me, though.  I think expecting a progression-based game to last forever is a bit foolish.  It means either an infinite number of levels (with an exponential curve) or some sort of broken endgame.  No thanks.

It bothers me if they are trying to get me to pay a subscrition fee to play a single player game with multiplayer co-op.

Seems to be working for Blizzard.

It was a really good review and I can't find anything to really argue about.

Dammit.

Page at www.ddo.com has been changed, original quoted below from the ddo forum post (just cause I think it's funny and it might disappear too).  It refers to MMO news sites now instead of fan sites, also the Human female hairstyle bit is no longer quoted. 

Funny how that works.

This is from one of the forum threads, nice work Xil, somehow I am pleased because some of the praise rubs off on me or something... 

Heh.  What's funny about that quote is a) I am a terrible typist despite using a keyboard daily (and is shows in everything I write up) so the "hapharzard typist" shoe fits, but b) that poster mispelled cerebral and provoking so he's right there with us.  :-D  [Or, it could be a second language thing, an excuse I only wish I could use...]

Xilren

Twitch combat and living in Australia means I probably don't have to even consider bothering
with it. Part of the reason twitch works for FPS games is because setting up local servers is
easy, something this game clearly won't have.

An endgame that involves waiting on the next content patch? That should be interesting to
watch. It will also be interesting how the masses "optimize" the process of getting to max
level with the launch content available. I'd even say the reducing XP is as much about limiting
the effects of dungeon complexity imbalance and possible exploits.

I enjoyed it right up until the point where my warhammer "worn out" in the middle of combat. I was left using my fists against two gray oozes.

Two things happened shortly after that. My character died. I uninstalled DDO.

Do you uninstall every game you suck at?  Sounds like you just didn't know the game mechanics and you paid an understandable price for your ignorance.  Am I getting the point of your post right, or were you trying to make some sort of statement about the game itself?

I think the point is: carry a spare weapon.

Wish I could play.

I don't. I enjoy reading you whines multiple times per day. Err.. wait. Yes, I wish you could play.

Feel free to PM me your thoughts on DDO sometime.  I'm actually pretty curious about how you'd rate it against your experiences in WoW.

This is a LOT like the original NWN.  Yeah, the one that came out in the mid '90's.  I dunno, I am pseudo ambivalent to the game currently.  I do have a beta invite, just not sure if I will use it.  I like Turbine a LOT.  Hopefully they succeed and bring in more new meat to the market.

Give your beta invite to me.

That's an order, not a request. :evil:

Edit: Don't make me download and play "Flyff" - I swear I will!

Chibi anime characters? I'm downloading Flyff right now. The number of games I've never heard of is astounding. Gotta play'em all.

I played this during the stress test over the weekend and one thing that really stood out for me was the interface (trying not to break NDA here)

Granted, I didn't delve into the details, but I think Turbine really needs to take a look at WoW in regards to the default interface. I think the interface provided the details needed (I don't really know who their target audience is), but I did find the interface counter-intuitive and it took me a bit to figure out some of the things that it presented.

I did like many other aspects of the game though.

Ok, Flyff sucks.

I ran around and killed bat creatures and mushrooms for an hour. Flyff is a MMORPG where all you do is auto-attack - the entire game. I got to level 5, already the grind is killing me. I could read a book while playing. The entire game is double click on a monster and heal if you are low on health.

Plus the music gets really annoying really fast.

I think there is room in this world for a cool, cutesy style MMORPG - but not this one.

I thought R.O.S.E. would be it. But it wasn't. Ragnarok was it for like a day. Until the towns started filling up with text bubbles and nothing else. I bet Nippon Ichi could make a kickass one.

Fate would make a cutesy MMO.  Throw in some cute emotes, like /shy, /blush and /giggle, and some crafting and we'd be SO GODDAMN FUCKIUNG ADORABLE!!!   And schild could fish. 

Balance would be hell though!

Nerf charm, my shield/defensive magic build is gimped.

I predict fun D&D balance whines in the future.  Does D&D still follow the old "some classes (wizards) suck at the beginning and roxxor at the end while others (fighters, rogues) roxxor at the beginning and are kind of bleh at the end" balance scheme?  Not so cool for the bleh guys when you spend 1 month levelling up and a year at max level.

 The more I think of it, the more I think D&D is not the greatest model for a MMO.  It's riddled with balance problems but they don't matter because a decent DM will always balance the game to make it fun for all the players.  If you have a gimpy race/class/skill combo, the DM can plop in encounters expressly designed to make that guy useful.  Not easy to do in a MMO.

It will be interesting to see how many changes they need to make to the rules.

I'm picturing lots of alts.  Lots and lots of Alts.

Thanks so much for that write - up.  I was delighted to hear too about the attention to unique graphics.

I have one concern about the questing:  Can they be shared?  Will extensive chain quests create barriers to grouping with friends unless they are at the same point in the quest chain?

That is a great question. Players should get credit for completing an instance whether or not the actual quest was ever initiated.

Not a problem.

Xilren

D&D's balance problems were hugely reduced in 3rd Ed.  HUGELY.  As in, first level wizards don't completely suck any more.  And we'll note that DDO is based on 3rd Ed.   :wink:

I'm thinking the spell point system (mana) will help lowbie casters also.

Yeah, 3E introduced Mages with Xbows. Very good change.

Eh, balancing whines in a pve/pvp game are usually just "his DPS is higher than mine!" arguments b/c higher DPS=more kills=more exp/honor.  So long as DDO continues to have multiple ways for people to accomplish their quests and usefulness for classes I don't think we'll see too much of that.  I mean, how do you balance a rogues trap disabling to a fighters damage output anyway?  Since the rewards are given for quest completion instead of kills, it's a much more minimized issued.  But, I think you'll see far more whines from the "every class should be able to solo every quest equal to their CR" people (I sort of alluded to this in my post).  That's always struck me as a very illogical mindset to proceed from.  

I mean sure, if there's two ogres between you and your quest goal, it's nice that a fighter could straight up battle them, a rogue sneak around them, or a wizard charm one to battle the other/web them/cast invisible and walk by them; that's doable today.  But not all quest are the same, so if instead of 2 ogres it's 2 Wraiths who are incorpreal so the fighter can't easily kill them, or spiders who see invisible/hidden well so the rogue can't sneak by them, or some high Spell resistance monster the wizard can't easily affect....  THAT's when the solo whining begins (and believe me, it has).  I expect the offical boards will be whine central just like they are for every mmorpg to date.

It's always been somewhat paradoxical to me; people want classes that are truely different from one another, but at the same time, they want each to be able to do the exact same things...and a pony.

Xilren

I was more concerned about the high end, actually.  When the wizard can do the fighter's job and the rogue's job and the ranger's job and the bard's job all at the same time and basically just obliterate the universe by batting an eyelash.  Though the 10th level cap will probably put that off.

I don't really think balance is just about dps.  If they have a shitload of high level traps in most dungeons, everyone will be required to have a rogue.  Will this crowd out other "utility + dps" classes?  I dunno.  When rangers, fighter-archers, sniper-rogues, wizards and sorcerors are competing for ranged dps slots, there should be some kind of balance.

My fear for both classes and feat/skill builds is that once the most powerful combos are discovered, they'll design the challenging content around those combos.  This has happened in just about every other game I've ever seen (including Turbine's AC1).  I was just hypothesizing that it could be even worse in D&D because the classes they are starting with aren't that balanced and the feat and skill selection system makes it easy to gimp yourself to oblivion or cheese yourself to overpoweredness.

Anyway, I guess the juicy details won't be available until the NDA is dropped, so I'll have to curb my curiosity unless I get into the beta test.

Great post btw Xilren.

Thief/Cleric, FOTM

[Edit]  good write up BTW, thx.  I wonder how this will survive against AoC and GW.  The hubby/instaQuest world will be getting crowded.

If a person expects to be able to anything and everything themselves, in a game based on D&D...they are kidding themselves.

I think this isn't too far from what was mentioned.  Everyone in the group gets exp.  If you show up late, you get a penalty for being late, which wears off the longer you're there(it keeps track of how long it takes you to finish, vs. when you got in).  You only get 'credit' for the quest if you talked to the NPC at the begining, but you will get the normal exp, and any items you loot while inside.  If multiple people have the same quest, they need only do the instance once.

Also, there's an 'XP Report' on the quest helper window that you can pull up to see what the base exp for the mission is, what mods you've earned, and what exp you've gained from optional items..  At all times you can see how much exp you'll get for finishing the quest.

Alkiera

Just about every other MMO though revolves almost 100% around combat, and every popular character template is designed with that in mind.  Damage, Tanking, and Healing are everything, and every useful talent, spell, or item exists to enhance those three things.  Now I haven't played DDO yet, but from the sound of it, it rewards players for avoiding combat as much as it does fighting.  So with stealth and utility offering alternate means of making your way through quests, ideally it will keep particular builds from being the "ulitimate".

Now it's just a matter of whether or not things actually work that way in practice.

When you uninstall Flyff your computer dings and says:

"The Flyff has been removed from your computer."

Ya know, it was worth the install and hour of my time just to see that. From henceforth all people who play shitty MMOGs have The Flyff and should be treated as such.

I'll spoil the suspense about what the most powerful combo is: warrior, healer, rogue, magic-user.  As it's always been.   :wink:

So, 2.5 levels of each then ?

If you want to be a hobbling gimp, yes.

yeah, multiclassing is so, so not the way to go for power.  If you must, wait till prestige classes are in, and do that.  But in general, a level 10 Class_X is much superior to a level 5 X/level 5 Y split.  Depending on the classes, you're only as effective as a level 7 or so, even tho you are 10, and if one of them is a pure caster...  you're hosed for being useful as a caster.  You're level 10, but cast like a level 5... now, try to hit a level 10 critter as a level 5 caster.  Really.  Give it a shot.

Alkiera

Actually, it seems a few levels of fighter, and then swapping to caster can be really effective. If anything, it opens up more equipment options, including caster-enabled Elven Chainmail.

Last time I was listening to people powe game DnD they were definately taking advantage of multi-classing to gain access to feats that combo'd with other feats and so on.  I'll ask my DnD playing friends what some broken combo's are.

The good combos tend to be between classes that have roughly similar roles, e.g. a "warrior" type class like paladin grabbing a level of fighter to get a bonus feat.  Casters are notoriously bad for multiclassing since every level you take in another class slows down your all-important spell progression; the extra 12 hit points you'd get from those 2 levels of fighter pale in comparison to being able to cast Fireball instead of Melf's Acid Arrow because you took those 2 levels as a pure caster instead.

Prestige classes do make things a bit more complex, since some of the prestige class abilities can be extremely broken under the right circumstances, and prestige classes are usually designed to be easily combined with a variety of base classes.  DDO reportedly isn't going to have prestige classes at launch, though, and I'd be very surprised if they ever tried to implement every single one.

But those fighter levels can be really helpful, as they can open up item choices, especially helmets and weapons.

For instance, I did it with one of my mages in the IWD series. The 2 extra fighter levels, combined with something like Tenser's Transformation (I think that's the name, it basically turns the mage into a super-beast tank for a time), can be devastating.

A lot of people hate on her, but I thought Jaheira, as a Fighter/Druid worked really well at higher levels.

I am wondering if they have alignments in the game with consequences for acting outside of your alignment? It would be my dream to see all those cocksucking powergaming munchkin paladins losing their class permanently because they went around killing anything that moved with no regard for how it affected their alignment. From what I recall, alignment was what was supposed to balance the power of the paladin as well as the high required stats for the class.

I recall hearing something about Monk/ caster combos being completly broken.  That was in 3rd not 3.5 though, so it's probably been fixed. 

My theory on Tenser's Transformation was always that if I wanted to be a tank who can't cast spells and has a BAB equal to my level, I'd have just been a fighter all the way.   :wink:  I'd rather spend those high level spell slots on casting stuff like Reverse Gravity.  Outdoors.



Might be part of why they haven't put monks into DDO yet.  (I had to double check the public FAQ to make sure I wasn't breaking  :nda: by saying that.)

Yeah, I don't think we'll see them.  Thinking about it, they're probably still broken.  Able to cast fireballs while using evasion, decent melee and an AC bonus in robes.

Monks, even in 3.5, are still pretty broken, as are certain druid setups.

Turbine, in their wisdom, chose to not include either class.  While sure, you could take a couple levels of fighter for more early hp and an extra feat, then continue with cleric... but you could also just be a paladin, and get some very nice other bonuses.  High level pallys are almost as bad as monks.  As a cleric, there's a 4th level spell 'Divine Power' that basically does the same as Tensor's(+6 str, BAB same as warrior, +1 hp/level), but with no transforming, and you can still cast.  It's also pretty short, 1 rnd/level.  Still, 7 round is a decent amount of time, when you first get the abillity to cast it.  I don't know if it's actually in DDO, tho.

Alkiera

Very few people on these boards get your humour, retard.  You should probably stop.

But part of the joy in your humor is watching other people not get it.  You're going soft in your old age.

Alas, I'm probably just looking for validation.  Time to get a puppy, or a child.  And torture them mentally.

I'll be the one to predict it flops, so that if it does, I get to be the one jumping up and down and telling you all "I told you so!". Cause being able to do that owns.

If you have followed Schild's position on WoW - you can still do that - regardless how well the game does  :-D

heh.  WoW sucks!  I mean, nobody likes it, it's ugly.  5 million users?  That's nothing...

Yeah, nothing but prolly 60+% of the NA MMO market.  They obviously did something right.

Alkiera

Yeah, well he better not abuse his authority to muscle in on me as DDO doomcaster. I've called dibs on it, fair and square!

I am "Demeter", a human female bard, if anyone wants to play together sometime. I'll be gone for a few days but should have plenty of time starting mid next week.

I don't know much about D&D so I have no idea what I'm doing. No idea what the numbers mean, no idea what a bard is even supposed to do.

Bard is a Buff class, a pickpocket, and minor spellcaster (wizard spells).

Whenever I had a choice of characters to make in a singleplayer game, I always tried to toss in a bard.

What's the gameplay for a caster?

I've read lots of comments about twitchy melee, which makes sense, but how the wizards are played? I guess targeting is in and the spells are still on a quickbar. So how this twitch style applies to the casting part of the game? How is this different from the current mmorpg combat?

I'm looking for a straight description, not comments.

I could Almost imagine casting in DDO working like a 3rd person shooter.

Granted, I haven't played the game at all yet, but I think that would be an interesting concept.

Spellcasting is, sadly, not very twitchy.  Select target, cast spell.  If someone hits you, make a concentration check or lose the spell(and the spell points).  I guess positioning matters for some AE spells, like the cone of Burning Hands.  If you're in the right spot, you can hit more, etc.

Alkiera

I assume there is no friendly fire for something like cone of cold?

For those seriously wondering about gimpy combos in D&D - in P&P for me it was always the guy who took one level of Rogue for the starting skill points and the sneak attack, and then switched to whatever he was really going to play. When I DM, I simply warn my characters about unstable boulders that tend to fall from the sky on to such characters.

As long as the character's background was urban, it is a reasonable path. A farmer taking a first level in rogue doesn't work, though.

Most of the D&D computer games I have seen used the rules from the books and included friendly fire from spell casting. So, that AoE sleep spell put everyone to sleep, including your allies (unless they were elves).

Definitely something worth verifying in this game though...

Most D&D computer games were single-player so if you fucked up you were only hurting yourself.  Allowing PC's to hit each other with AoE spells would obviously be a bad idea, and I think the devs have said as much in interviews.  I will miss the strategy involved in trying to hit as many enemies as possible while trying not to kill your own party members though.

I think you'd need a turn-based game for that to work properly.  It'd be pretty hard to keep track of all your party members in real time and line your spells up to avoid hitting them.  It's hard enough just keeping track of which enemies are worth targetting and which the fighters are going to already have killed by the time your spell finishes.

Friendly Fire is another name for a license to grief.

No kidding; even with damage spells coded not to hurt other players, earlier in the alpha they had to change code in taverns to prevent idiots from spam casting Grease causing noobs to get stuck in a continual fall cycle...

MMORPG players are nothing if not predictable.

Xilren

Yeah, the second you allow friendly fire you can look forward to a rash of "AOE_GRIEFER" characters.

Now what might be nice is to make it on option that grants higher XP for quests, and people would only turn it on if they trusted everybody. Having it always on would be a disaster though.

I agree, that would be extremely cool.

Sounds good, but it also sounds like it's pretty much group mandatory, which clears it off of the list for me.  I've got max 3 hours to play on any given night, and I'm frequently interrupted in that time (making dinner, laundry, etc).  As such I tend to annoy any party I'm in with my constant AFK's.  On weekends I can buckle down and do group stuff, but that just isn't an option for me on weekdays.

CoH and WoW allowed me to do some useful stuff solo.  It sounds like DDO doesn't.

Agree that this has absolutely been the case in MMOs to date.  DDO seems to be taking a new slant on thing, I was wondering if they were going to try their hand at this as well (especially as this was a big part of the experience of the PnP game).  Hard choices and all that. 

I got to think that someone will come up with some penalty/reputation system at some point that allows for friendly fire to be reintroduced into these games, which will end up creating a deeper game.

A most extreme measure would be something financial, like a security deposit on an apartment.  Pay a month up front, when you go to quit, if you have a bad reputation you lose the deposit.  As you reputation gets worse and worse, you are required to put more into the security deposit.  I'm not sure I'd play that game, but I bet it would reduce the griefing (course, it might generate some lawsuits as well).

Having now seen this game being played I have to say...

What the fuck?

We've all had debates about whether WoW's gfx are good/bad/ugly/simple but damn DDO looks terrible.  That "feel" to the world we talked about WoW and FFXII having?  It has none, it should have some because as far as I could tell every quest took place in some instanced hand-made zone.  But no, it looked boring, hell after watching 4 hours off and on I kept thinking my friend was doing the same quest only to find out it was different.  Hopefully at later levels things start getting really really impressive, which I can imagine they would but the level1-2 stuff just looked uninspired at best.

The mobs looked assy too, the spell graphics were boring (look out purple balls! Oh noes here come the green ones!) but I really had stopped paying attention at that point.

So that was gfx, which is about all I observed.  Although I did notice some other things:

-Gear was boring at least at lower levels (but with only 10 I think you get a lot of time out of each level) +2 chainmail?!  I mean sure that is how all rpg gear works but at least give it a cool name or something.  I know that is classic DnD but I have a hard time getting excited even when I'm upgrading from Green to Purple in WoW despite the nifty gfx change and statline goodness.  Plus one just doesn't motivate me.

-The combat, which I was excited to see, is fairly twitch, I mean you have to aim if your shooting a bow, kind of and when you are melee'ing you run around possibly even faster then WoW and click that mouse diablo-style.  But the combat looks dumb, the things that make WoW's combat look artificial are even more exaggerated in DDO.  It was really bad because my friend was fighting tiny mobs like kobolds, spiders and metal dogs(?) but his swings had so little to do with the mob (although they flash red if you hit them) that it really did not look good from where I was sitting.

-Finally, barrel breaking, ugh less is more.  In diablo it was all good because the more thing you could click on the more fun you were having.  But somehow it just didn't work in DDO although it could have been that somehow his character kept missing the barrels or they wouldn't die for 3-4 hits (not sure if it was lag or what).  That was not fun to watch.

I can't comment on the mechanics or the ui or anything truly insightful having never played the game myself.  My friend was really enjoying it, but he also has a two foot high stack of DnD books on the floor near his comp so take that with a grain of salt.

When the NDA goes away I'll have a lot to say about this. Until then  :nda:

Don't be like that. You, I, and everyone else here knows that it really doesn't matter what name they drop on newb gear, as it's all trash anyway.

Besides, in DnD, only the super uber stuff deserves to have a real name.

I don't think I'm breaking any NDA stuff here because this is more about D&D itself, but I was confused by the number of weapons that all did the same thing but had different names.

If you look at how many 1D6 weapons there are, it seemed like tons. What's the point of this? Is it for example that some classes can use Rapiers and some other swords and at later levels those weapons differentiate more? Because as far as I could tell there were a whole bunch of 1D6 weapons that all had basically the exact same stats.

Well there's somewhat of a difference in D&D in that some weapons are piercing, some are slashing, and some blunt.  Also, while I don't know how things work out in DDO in the upper levels, in D&D you can become increasingly specialized in specific types of weapons.  A character with 12 lvs. in Fighter could have Weapon Focus, Greater Weapon Focus, Weapon Spec., and Greater Weapon Spec., giving them +2 to attack and +4 to damage with their chosen weapon.  So maybe a Rapier and Long Sword do the same damage, but in the hands of a character specializing in Rapier, the Rapier will do more damage.

There's also the fact that some weapons are "light" whereas others aren't, so some weapons are better choices for (say) rogues with Weapon Finesse, or dual-wielding rangers.  Also, no character is proficient with all weapons - almost anyone can use a club that does 1d6 damage since it's a "Simple" weapon, but for the most part only monks can use kamas, which also do 1d6 damage but are "Exotic".

In PnP the fact that some weapons are better for some characters allows the DM to guide which characters get items - for example, if I think the fighter needs a little damage boost, I might be more likely to throw a magic longsword into the next big treasure hoard the party finds, knowing that since he's a longsword specialist they'd have to be nuts not to give it to him.  Conversely, if the cleric hasn't gotten a new toy in a while, I'll make it a mace since that's a stereotypical cleric weapon.  Et cetera.

Even with completely random treasure generation (which is actually what the D&D rulebooks recommend IIRC), having differentiation like that makes for more interesting dynamics when loot is being divvied - different items are worth more to different characters based on stat/race/class requirements, so it's possible for two characters to swap items of similar objective value with each other and each feel like they've gotten the better end of the deal.

OK that makes some sense. I also some some random website where it had stuff like certain weapons are harder to use in enclosed spaced or something like that. That may have been AD&D - I've never understood the difference.

I had some D&D books and AD&D second edition but my friends and I always played very loose and fun rather than rules-Nazi style so I don't remember much about the rules. We would just make up weapons and such.

D&D is actually the same thing as AD&D now.  They haven't produced any basic D&D stuff in a long tme, so when they released 3rd edition they decided to just call it D&D.

This is something I expect all MMO and non-D&D players to bitch loud and long about.  You're not going to have sword doing 2-5 damage at level 1 and then another sword that does 200-355 damage at level 10 (40) on your 7000HP warrior.  At most you're going to have a 1d6+5 sword with some specials on it on a 200 Hitpoint Fighter.

  Uber for D&D, but a huge yawnfest for the kiddies that have grown-up with Final Fantasy/ EQ/ WoW's over-inflated numbers. (Bigger numbers equals bigger OOOOHs!)   I hope expectations for success are tempered in this, but know they aren't.

200HP at level 10 is impossible. Fighter get d10 hit points and barbarians get d12. Even with +4 per level from an 18 constitution, no one is getting to 200HPs at level 10 without cheating.

Probably not, no.  but 150 isn't out of the question for a barbarian, and when he uses his Rage, he should be well over 200.  But yeah, the average level 10 character will likely have between 80 and 150 hp... the fact that melee weapons typically do 1d6+str+magic bonus is balanced around that... and that by lvl 10, most melees attack 3 times per round, heck, even a wizard gets 2 attacks/turn at that point.

Of course, magic by level 10 is getting pretty powerful, with spell like Cone of Cold doing 10d6 cold damage to a 60ft-long cone.  Enough to put a serious hurting on anyone who doesn't make the reflex save, or have cold resistance equipment.  But magic has definate drawbacks.

Alkiera

Pedantic much?

The point of the comparison was that other games fighters have x thousands of hitpoints and in DD0 no one is breaking low hundreds and if that would cause mental issues for the average mmogtard.

In PnP, you can do just about anything as long as the DM is cool with it.   :wink:

I'm fairly certain that it could even happen in DDO if you really set your mind to it.  For example, I reckon you could get your Constitution all the way up to 24 by level 10 as long as you picked your race and class right and sacrificed all your other stats.  And that's not even counting magical enhancements.

A lot of it's min-maxing.  Will your crit-spec'd rogue get more mileage out a d6-damage rapier that threats on 18-20 or a d8-damage longsword that only threats on 19-20?  Or will the weapon's special abilities be useful to you in cheesy ways (entangling, disarming, whatever)  Or do you get free bonuses for being a particular race or having a particular deity that you wouldn't normally get, so you can burn proficiencies elsewhere?

I personally go with a more stylistic approach.  My dwarven priest in our local Geek-Night pen n' paper game burned a feat to pick up warhammers (even though he got free martial weapon proficiency when he switched to Warpriest at 8th level) just because that's what I wanted him to use from Day One.  If I were munchkiny, I would have taken a free Greatsword proficiency the DM offered since it's my diety's favored weapon, but it just didnt' work for me.  Or dwarven waraxe since I get to treat it as a martial weapon instead of an exotic weapon (and would have made it infinitely easier to find a figure in the local hobby stores, which seem to have a dearth of hammer-carrying dorfs in stock)

Also, some of it has to be consideration of what kind of magic weapons you think you'll have access to--are you hoping for a Battleaxe of Bad-ass Buttwhoopin' or the Shortsword of Sneaky Mean Dirty Rotten Stuff?

Murgos got the point.  I knew I should have put in a disclaimer that I drew the fighter's HPs out of my ass because damned if I remember what dice they use, I played Mages.

What can you expect?  They're geeks, they live for finding discrepancies in minutia.

It's minutiae since you decided to pluralize discrepancy.

I like to fuck little boys.

Hi, I'm Kettle.  Would you like to give me a rim job?

Nice mod edit on that last sentence. Not terribly cool.

I'd been wondering if that were a mod edit.

I may not stop laughing for days.

Now that the NDA is lifted, I can try to actually work this out with real numbers:

- Pick dwarf as starting race and max Con.  (Con 18 + 2 racial bonus = 20)
- Take Toughness as your first feat.  (+3 hp, +1 per level)
- Take 10 levels of barbarian.  That's 120 hit points from your Hit Dice, since DDO just gives you max HP instead of rolling for it.
- Put both your stat increases into Con.  (Con = 22)
- Take the dwarf and barbarian action enhancements that boost Con.  (Con = 24)
- You also get +20 hp at first level in DDO (Heroic Toughness or somesuch).

So that gives us 120(Bbn HD) + 70(24 Con = +7 hp per level) +20 (Heroic) + 12 (Toughness) = 222 hp at 10th level.  And that's not even counting magical enhancements like Rings of False Life.

Wouldn't work in PnP, though, even if you got really lucky rolls.

It's shameful the the amounts of stealth edits around recently.

Dwarf barbarian is the uber template imo. I wanted so bad to be a rogue (but not forced to group). After getting repeatedly smacked around, I rolled a dwarf barbarian (half orc barbarian being one of my favorite D&D combos) and flew through everything easily. *yawn*

I  :heart: my dwarven barbarian.  And his Greatclub +1 of Ooze Bane.