Crafting Update from Gleek

Just a quick note that I'm continuing to level my crafting, and I can tell I'm about to start hitting a slow down with crafting progression. check it out:


What do those levels mean? Well, it means I'm about a third of the way there with my arcane crafting levels since there are 75 levels to be earned in total for each type of crafting. What I'm also noticing is that I'm really starting to get into some crafting shards that I'd actually consider saving instead of deconstructing for more raw materials.

That's also something I didn't get at first . . . you can take the shards you create and deconstruct them so you have more materials for construction. OHHHHHHH!

I decided to be a bit more risky with my crafting recipes as well and try for some 50 percent chance combines instead of my usual 75 or 85 percent chance combines. For the most part I was lucky and earned some really nice crafting exp for my risk taking. What I like is that I don't lose all the components when I have a failed attempt. I only lose maybe one or two of each component type. Other MMOs have been more brutal. I like this method. *thumbs up*

Anyway, now, instead of dumping all of my extra loot into the auction house, I keep it for crafting, and when I get a piece of gear that's just has a straight modifier like +4 plate . . . my reaction is kind of . . . meh . . . actually, those are the pieces I usually end up sending to the auction house.

Happy Dueling!

Welcome Lessah and Down with Speeeiders

This week we invited a new player into our fold with her oh I don't know . . . 5 years of experience with the game . . . podcasts by the bundle . . . large community involvement . . .

If you're reading this blog now because you somehow knew my accomplishments in Wizard101 and are just following me around to see what's next, this would be like adding Steven Spiritcaller to your friends list. ;-)

Lessah of DDO Cocktail Hour fame dipped her foot into our simple band of four and joined us for a night of fun and disoluteness, but mostly dissoluteness.

I was so busy having fun for the night that I really only got one screenshot, and that was all of us standing in the box of awesomeness at the end of the Shadow Crypt.


We loves us some easy exp from the Shadow Crypt. :)

After our Shadow Crypt run we decided to try out the Spawn of Whisperdoom quest since it's free to play and we're quickly running out of free to play material. Spawn of Whisperdoom is divided into a few sections. At first you're in a jungle clearing where invisible demon dogs lie in wait and entirely visible ogres threaten to squish the squishies like me. We did fine though and managed to dispatch all of the entry mobs without much problem . . . except Lessah got held by a hold spell and almost died. *snicker* Of course when you come into a group and you've got all this clout and expectation of super human performance, you know the game is just out to get you. hehe.

The majority of this instance is a large tunnel system full of a new kind of evil . . . a diabolical never before seen type of evil!!



pfft, all evilness is nothing compared to the evil of the speeeider! It's an MMO CLASSIC!

Spider hunting is definitely what we were up to. For the most part, this instance is a breeze with a group, aside from a stray lightning bolt or random trap, it's not too tough. The worst of the worst in this instance though is Whisperdoom herself! She's a large, nasty spider who is hasted with regenerative properties and likes to inflict you with burning blood and horrid wilting. *shiver*

Although the DDO wiki guide suggests she's incredibly resistant, I had read on a forum somewhere that fire works, and since I'm a fire spec sorcerer, I didn't worry too much about things like disintegrate scrolls or what not.

Whisperdoom was tough though and a good fight. There was an awesome moment where we were down 3 members of the group (including the NPC cleric) and Whisperdoom still had half her life. It was time to mana dump all I had into a stream of fireballs right at whisperdoom. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM! Terrifying. Truly Terrifying--especially with my hitpoints.

The true heroes there were Lessah and Ulan as they spammed me with heals and kept me afloat until Whisperdoom went down. YES! VICTORY!

. . .

The rest of the dungeon was spent wandering around killing respawns as we hunted for Whisperdoom's chest, which we never found. Supposedly there are four chests in this instance: one in the Village, one in the Hatchery (heretoforeverafter known as "The Snatchery" . . . don't ask), and two in the Lair.

All we found were the three collectables: Splinterskull Battle Standard, Splinterskull Historical Documents, and Silver Goblet. That's ok though as those collectibles got Ulan, Spode, and Ophiga a turn in reward above and beyond that for completing the instance (and the rest if us got some bonus exp :)).

It was a good night for the static group and good to have Lessah among our ranks!

Thanks for the fun, and as always, happy dueling!

Ok, fine . . . DDO crafting is kind of fun :p

So, you may have read my earlier rant about crafting here. It's still true though, every bit of it. It's confusing as heck. Any game mechanic that requires 17 printed pages to explain, is most likely too confusing. What 17 pages? oh yeah, you have GOT to check out the new compendium write up on DDO crafting. Really well done and it also features this awesome picture:


Brilliant.

Seriously though, I got into a crafting groove today and started buzzing from creating shards out of all the loose components floating around in my crafting bag, and then deconstructing those shards for more components.

The end result is that I've leveled up a bit in crafting. WOOT!


And it was so fun I needed to run over here and tell my audience of five people that it definitely had a "buzz" worthy quality to it.

I may have been a little harsh on Turbine in my first post, but I'm changing my tune. Between reading the new 17 page guide and playing around with transmuting and deconstructing this morning . . . I'm sold. I genuinely like DDO crafting. It just took me a while to overcome the confusion.

Happy Dueling!

Vampires and Ophiga's Love Interest

The plan with the Sunday night static group and The Shadow Crypt worked perfectly! Check it out: First, I logged on Aweso (my bard who was flagged for The Shadow Crypt) and then everybody else in the static group joined up. Next, everyone entered the instance, and I logged Aweso out and logged Gleek back in.

Bada bing Bada boom, we were running The Shadow Crypt again for some super nice exp! WOOT!

The only problem was getting everybody to log in on time instead of fashionably late, and by everybody I mean Spode. hehe. It's alright though, he timed it perfectly to join up as we had dimension door'd it back to the entrance just as he logged on.

Again, the wiki page for this maze of an instance was super helpful. Last night we were in "Instance Three" of The Shadow Crypt since the room to the east of the entrance was blue. HOW THE HECK PEOPLE FIGURED THIS OUT IN THE FIRST PLACE IS AMAZING. Props to those people since this instance is horribly confusing. *insert props head nod*

Our path in instance 3 meant we needed to travel east, dimension door to beginning, north, west, west, west, west, north, north, north, south, south, north, west, west, east, and east.

. . . and then we were lighting up Vampire treats for Roasted-Vampire snack-time.


. . . special note here, the balding fella in front here is the Favored Soul NPC known as Roshan . . . also now known as Ophiga's love interest. LOL. Jussssst Kiiiidding, Ophiga!

But seriously, the vampire was so jealous of Ophiga's love for Roshan he went all Jedi death grip on him!


It was ok, we finished the Vampire was off before any real damage was inflicted to Ophiga's "friend."

Anyway, the only real trick to finishing this instance is that you need to find a gear from every room you visit along your pathway, even the water maze rooms. :) If you do this, then you get a giant chest at the end that fits six comfortably.


Reminds me of the old days when driving my Pinto at lunch time with all my friends packed in to head to McDonald's.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

After our Shadow Crypt run we decided to head into the Temple of Vol to try the Church and the Cult quest in House Phiarlan (or "House P" as the cool kids call it). Joe had run the instance on Hard mode and unlocked Elite, so we decided to give it shot. The only problem was that Ophiga was a little low to detect all the traps and those elite traps HURT. It got to be too comical, so we started over on Hard and once again we were lighting up Vampire treats for roasted-Vampire snack-time.


WHOA! Wait, wrong screenshot folder. sorry about that. *blush*


Uh, yeah, here we go . . . he was pretty confident we weren't going to leave his place alive, but we knew there was a NPC outside waiting for us afterwards, and that was all the motivation we needed to pull out the win!

Had a ton of fun last night with the crew!

Happy dueling!

Adventures in Soloing: Yikes BEHOLDERS!

Most Saturday mornings I log on Gleek and farm Gwylan's seven times and then log off. It's just kind of my way of keeping the cash flow going enough to afford spell components and random stuff.

I did that today as well, and things went as normal as ever, but then I started hunting for things I had never done before in places like the Harbor. You know, do a little faction farming . . . that kind of thing.

Then I remember there was this uber quest in the Harbor that I had never peaked my head into and it piqued my interest (see what I did there?). So I decided to try the quest, "Invaders!" just to see how fast I'd die.

The short answer was relatively fast.

Why?

BEHOLDERS! This was, in fact, my first encounter with a beholder in DDO and I was pretty stoked about it. I also learned that using line of sight was huge with this massive floating evil heads of evilness. Just look at that thing.


Roasted beholder anyone?

Well, after dying a handful of times, I decided to recall and get the heck out of dodge. I must say that I LIKED IT! It was pretty cool to see the waterworks in a whole new light. One where the kobolds were outta there and evil alien invaders were in there. Really fun to play through, and I have to give Turbine props for this quest. I definitely want to go back in here with my crew and give this a shot in . . . a few levels.

Happy Dueling!

DDO Schedule

The most recent schedule I published to the DDO Static group looked a little like this:

24 April: Shadow Crypt wrap up with Ulan (unless that gets done out of cycle)
1 May: Delera's "From Beyond the Grave" and "And the dead shall rise" if time to do both
8 May: Mother's Day (might want to take this one off -- jus' sayin')
15 May: Spawn of Whisperdoom and Made to Order
22 May: The Enemy Within
29 May: Dreams of Insanity
5 June: Sands of Menechtarun
12 June: Sands of Menechtarun
19 June: Sands of Menechtarun
26 June: Sands of Menechtarun

On 24 April, we actually did finish up Shadow Crypt with Ulan and life was wonderful. Glad to get that finished. On 1 May instead of doing more Delera's quests, we did more delera's quests . . . well, one Delera's quest, which was "The Enemy Within"! WOW! We were so unprepared for that quest (MINDFLAYERS! EEK!), but I guess that's what makes it fun, right? Right!

I think we'll go ahead and try Spawn of Whisperdoom and Made to Order this week, and see how it goes. Any advice would be great!

Maybe for 22 May we'll put what we were supposed to do for 1 May, and I'm STILL CONFUSED ON WHETHER WE'RE DOING SANDS OR NOT!

hehe.

We'll see.

I gotta go to work.

More later!

Happy dueling!

Crafting Egads!

**Update** If you're looking for a good DDO crafting guide, Compendium just came out with a ginormous how-to for crafting. It does a much better job than my hack job go read it (click). **Update**

Well, I can now say I've spent about an hour or so on the new crafting update that came with Update 9 to Dungeons and Dragons Online. Here is how my leveling sits so far on Gleek:


What does that mean? Well, it means I'm a step closer to crafting better stuff, or seven steps closer in the case of any "Arcane" based crafting items. For each item that you craft, you receive experience based on how difficult the recipe was that you attempted. For instance, after hitting 100% chance for crafting a sword with acid touch on it, the experience rewards for crafting that same sword diminished until only 3 exp was given per sword created.

The entire process takes place in 3 or 4 rooms of the Crafting hall in House Kundarak. If you look above the doorways in the crafting hall, you're kind of given the basic formula for how crafting works.


You buy a deconstructing "potion bottle" from a vendor not pictured in that formula, but afterwards you take your item to the deconstruction room and combine it with your deconstruction "potion". The next room you take the resulting pieces and add it with crafting elements to create a shard. Finally, you take your shard and craftable blank item to door number three and create a new magic item.

. . .

It's incredibly confusing. You will find yourself running in and out of doorways and just kind of wishing they would have put it all in one room, but whatchagonnado.

I've tried to explain crafting to the people in my static group a couple of different times and pretty much failed both times. I fear this blog post won't help much either. In the end, crafting in DDO is just something you have to "do" to understand. Once you've deconstructed and reconstructed an item or two, you'll have it figured out.

And, if you're doing crafting for any length of time, you'll want to do what I did, and lay down some money for an ingredient bag from the DDO store. There's just so many pieces and components you're left with, that you're going to want to spend the money to get the extra bag. Having bag space is just too valuable not to go that route in DDO.

. . .

Just for kicks, I think I'll copy and past my e-mail to the static group where I tried to explain how crafting works. Uhhhh, not my best writing. Enjoy!

Basically you have a crafting hall in House K that you HAVE to go to to craft, right? In there you have a north end and a south end, which are both identical except for one end has an auctioneer and the other has a banker.

So check this out, you have THREE different crafting machines you need to use. So ridiculous. One machine is for deconstructing gear into basic elements and for deconstructing basic elements. One machine is for crafting shards from the basic elements or (I believe) for deconstructing basic elements into even more basic elements (I know, right? Completely stupid). One machine is for taking your shards and combining them with a base item to create something new.

It's uber confusing as to which machine you run up to.

Anyway, I spent some time taking a couple items and deconstructing them and combining them and ended up making a +1 sword with a really meaningless suffix ability (like +to sneak or something) just to get some practice and to level up my skill.

To make things worse, the whole crafting system is still in Beta and all the really good modifiers (+5 and above) are not even there. But you need to level your crafting on low level and mid level items first anyway.

The benefit of this is finding the perfect suffix abilities to fit the perfect slot in your gear since that can be challenging. AND, the other benefit is that all your items in the auction house will sell pretty good as people are buying them up to deconstruct them or get a base component from them.

Take a night to mess around with it, and you'll kind of see what I'm talking about.

At this point, it's just not worth it to me.

In the future, however, it may be the only answer to "perfect" your gear . . . and since we really don't care about that shizz in our ragtag band of paladins, oh well.

;p

Now if they ever include an ability that you can ONLY get through crafting, then I'll totally change my tune.

Hope that convinces you of . . . something . . . and if you know something I am not seeing yet, PLEASE let me know if the comments below.

Happy Dueling!

Snitching on the Snitch

There's a pretty fun level 5 quest in House Phiarlan with moderately nice xp awards called The Snitch that I've been hitting over and over with my level six (now seven) bard. I like this quest, and that's probably because the first time through it wasted me at the end.

Yes yes, I was being cocky and didn't even summon a hireling . . . well . . . I was being stupid and forgot to check if I had a hireling with me in my bags and after completing the majority of the quest, felt uber enough to take down the whole thing. I was doing pretty good too, right up until Garos. This fella.


Yeah, that's him standing over my corpse. :)

I ran back into the quest to finish it with a hireling only to find out that . . . ah crap, you can't finish this quest if you die. It puts up a pink force field (pink is always the best color for a force field) and I couldn't get back to Garos. It was extremely strange. I could send my hirelings in to attack Garos (they seemed bugged and could run through the force field . . . apparently immune to pink power), but even when they killed him, I didn't get credit for the quest.

After a big sigh and a long walk where I did some honest soul searching about the hours I've wasted on MMOs, I decided to go back in and do The Snitch proper . . . and that means summoning hirelings at the entrance. Good times.

Here's an X-fire video of that final fight with Garos.


I tried to keep it entertaining. :)

Side note: There is an option to earn an additional 10% by sneaking past some sleeping dogs. Yeah, I still couldn't get those dogs in the instance to stay asleep by myself. I'm pretty sure that to make that happen it would take two people: one to drop down in sneak to pull the lever and one to cross the roof to get credit for not waking the dogs.

OH, and I must say, The Snitch also features one of the most entertaining bosses I've ever fought: BEHOLD THE MIGHTY CRATEOS!



Hilarious.

Happy Dueling!