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!

Last Day of Risia Ice Games 2010-2011

Originally posted by me on 2 January 2011 on I am Stingite.

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

So, I’ve been playing a lot, and I mean A LOT, of Dungeons and Dragons Online lately.

It all started when the Risia games hit Stormreach, and I had been doing my best to earn those stinking tokens. It's funny but this was actually a learning experience for me in more ways than one. It also made me realize exactly how steep the learning curve is in this game . . . all from a simple exercise in jumping for tokens.

When you look at the history of the game, DDO really has been around for many years . . . 2006 in fact. It doesn't feel that way for me though since I really didn't start playing until it went free-to-play. What I didn't realize, or give respect to, was that people have been playing this game all along, and there are still people playing this game who jumped on board back in 2006.

I remember when it first launched my friend Tony asked me to come play with a few of his friends there, and I turned him down because I was having a hard enough time justifying the expense of an Everquest subscription. All it took was it going free to play; yeah, I'm that cheap. BUT WAIT! I'M NOT! For Christmas my wife sprung and bought be $50 worth of DDO tokens. WOOT!

I digress.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, the Risia Games!

So, the Risia games apparently are almost as ancient as DDO itself. Every holiday season, people don there ice skates and zoom around on large ramps collecting coins that can be redeemed for awesome stuff. The people in the know make bank. The people who aren’t in the know or don’t care to be in the know, lose bank.

I fancy myself as one of the fast ones of the slow group this year. I did get a +5 Ray of Frost and a cool ice damage weapon after all.



You see, all the hubbub centers around these “motes” that you get from redeeming coins from your ice escapades. You use motes to do things like add damage to a weapon or create an eternal Ray of Frost wand. It’s some reasonably cool stuff. You’ll hear people in the trade channel auctioning off “icy burst kits.” Basically these kits are everything you need to progress your way through all the combines at the ice forge you need to make an uber weapon. It’s like three recipes and 300 motes, and these things go for tens of thousands of plat.



I’ve learned a few things from my fascination with collecting these little coins and motes. I even worked out a cool system of grabbing three white coins and a blue coin, logging out my character, logging on another character and grabbing two more coins before the coins had respawned for my first character. It was kind of fun, until . . .

Until?

Until, a guild mate told me how he and some friends were gaining purple coins in a kind of cheap way. A blue coin is better than a white coin, but the purple coin rules them all with its reward. Basically they were having a high-level person teleport them to a spot where you could easily feather fall down to grab the purple coin over and over and over. I didn’t take his invitation to do this because it just irritated me. Here I was trying to work out some snazzy system of grabbing the junk coins while unbeknownst to me, you could get it some cheap cheating way. GAH! Just irritating to know that I had spent all that time being stupid and thinking I was cool when this dude was OWNING everything with a high level clicky.

That’s when it hit me. I’m a low leveler, and I suck. Sure, I felt a power surge when I found out I could cast a firewall and trick mobs into running back and forth in my fire while I was invisible . . . but I’m still just a ninth level sorcerer wannabe.

In retrospect, I should have swallowed my irritation and just joined my random guild mate in the cheat way of gaining purple coins. Seriously, I should have because it’d be great to reap the rewards. But, I have to say it would be MUCH MUCH cooler to earn a purple coin the legit way . . . even if I’m not a monk who can do these fantastic jumps. Check this insanity out:


By the very last day of the Risia Ice Games I finally figured out that strength modifies jump. /smacks head. HEY! DON'T LAUGH! I'm a sorcerer, ok? I don't know these things. I rock the firewall and invisible farming scheme I got going on, remember? Not smashin' heads and jumping walls. Well, I do have the jump spell in my arsenal now.

Perhaps next year it'll be me with the uber teleport clicky helping out guild mates get purple coins, eh?

I was just happy to finally make it to the third ramp by the last day. The fourth and final ramp eluded me.

Next year, you're mine, purple coins!

(I did make about 20k plat off of this, so . . . you know . . . awesome for this little ninth level sorcerer. ;p)

What's up Slaya?

Originally posted by me 24 November 2010 on I am Stingite.

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

If you're a reader of Tipa's blog, you'll already be familiar with our Sunday night group's forays into Dungeons and Dragons Online. We have a very cool ragtag group that consists of me (a halfling sorcerer . . . lovingly called a "gnome" by the rest of the group--Gleek Wondertwin to you, thank you), Spode (the human paladin), Ophiga (the drow rogue), Ulan (the human Favored Soul), and now Shyadaren (new to the group cleric and still catching up).

Outside of Sundays we all dabble here and there and solo mostly or play together if one of us is online. nothing serious.

Our most recent adventures have been in 3-barrel cove, a wonderful pirate-laden expansion full of . . . pirates . . . AND PIRATE SHIPS! This sky pirate ship has got to be one of the coolest things I've seen in game yet.


I freaking love that ship. I can't get enough screenshots of it, actually.


Seriously, that's so beyond awesome . . . like more awesome than the mechanical spider in Wild Wild West. ;-)

And once you make you're way up to the sky pirate ship, there's always a good handful of pirates to soak with an acid blast or two or three or four.


Easy come, easy go, those pirates. And once you've off'd them all, you are given this most magnificent wallpaper shot of the ship as a kind of side reward . . . as long as you dare walk the plank and spin the camera to take it. :-)


Yes, my feather fall cloak was ready at a moment's notice.

All this pirate killing finally paid off this morning as I hit the max number of pirates you can kill for experience in the zone . . .


We have a saying in the group whenever you hit the next level of slayer in an adventure zone that definitely is apropos here: "WHAT'S UP SLAYA!"

DING, Level 7.

Looks like the joys of fireball are all mine now. From my initial casts of fireball I have to say THAT IT ROCKS! It's incredibly spendy and addictive. It eats through my mana like nothing. I'm definitely going to have to put my fireball in check on Sunday nights.

:-)

Catch you on the flip side.

Press Release for DDO's Fifth Anniversary Event

Originally posted 23 February 2011 by me on The Friendly Necromancer.

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

Turbine celebrates fifth anniversary of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS ONLINE®: eBERRON UNLIMITED™

Turbine, Inc. today launched the latest content update to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons Online®: Eberron Unlimited™ (DDO Unlimited), recently named the Most Innovative MMO of the Decade*. DDO Unlimited’s newest update introduces a special two-part in-game event, new cosmetic items and a special gift for all players.

DDO’s 5th Anniversary Event:

To Celebrate DDOs 5th year in service, all players will be invited to travel back to the first port visited by early travelers of Stormreach – Smuggler’s Rest – and assist Euphonia in a treasure map hunt. Successful server wide completion of the first phase will unlock passage to Crystal Cove for a limited time.

· Smugglers Rest (All Levels)

Players from years past will recognize some of this besieged harbor, now overrun with eager pirates searching for pieces to a strewn pirate map. Adventurers can barter with Euphonia for rewards and access to the treasure of Crystal Cove – but they must all work together to open passage there. Players will explore the region, fight various Pirate-type monsters and collect dropped treasure. On occasion, a treasure map will appear revealing a hidden chest …but beware of nearby pirates.

· Crystal Cove (All Levels)

Crystal Cove is a hidden mine full of crystals for the taking. Players, solo or party, will protect and manage a team of Kobold miners that will collect the valuable minerals for you. Players will manage resources such as barrels, torches and a team of kobolds while protecting them from invading pirates. Most resources will cost crystals or can be purchased in the DDO Store. Once the crystal collection quota is met, everything else will be distributed as profit to the player party and can be traded with Euphonia for powerful goods. Crystal Cove will offer players to select from levels 1 to 25 to set their party difficulty and scale rewards appropriately.


Special Player Gift

Players who visit Sailor Calatin in the Harbor and sail to Smuggler’s Rest will receive a new pirate hat that provides players with better luck playing DDO including the special 5th Anniversary event in Smugglers Rest & Crystal Cove. Pirate hats will be distributed based on amount of time played and relative accomplishments, based on character. Players will also receive free Traveler Tokens and Blessings of the Traveler to join in the Marketplace Scavenger Hunt live event.

~~~~~end cut and paste~~~~~~

OK, so this is actually pretty fun. I logged on last night and ran through the special preview of the event they had. I didn't get to stay too long, but I did manage to pick up a new hat for my Sorcerer, Mr. Gleek Wondertwin to you.

Here's a pretty cool picture of a warforged wearing a pirate hat similar to the one I got.


Gleek doesn't look nearly as burly with his hat. LOL. Actually, it kind of looks like an empty fruit bowl on this fella here.

Happy Dueling!

Crafting the Winter's Wrath

Originally posted by me 13 February 2011 on The Friendly Necromancer.

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

In DDO there is an adventure pack called the Sentinel's of Stormreach, and in various chests of the missions in Sentinel's of Stormreach there are items you loot that you can combine to craft a weapon or a piece of armor that is slightly above the average quest reward.

All of this information can be found over on the DDO Wiki page here.

I gotta say that unraveling the unraveling enchantments wiki page took a little bit for me. I'm a sorcerer who works off of the Charisma score, not intelligence, after all, but it was enough for me to ascertain that the first thing I needed to do was collect the sigils of the goat, lion, and dragon. Those didn't drop like candy like I was hoping, unfortunately. Between the Sunday night static group runs and some soloing, it took a few times running the Bargain of Blood, Black Loch, Storm the Beaches, and Spies in the House quests to get all three. Luckily that wiki page really points you in the right direction.


Sure enough, yesterday, I got my last sigil to drop and finally had all three sigils. WOOT WOOT!

At that point it appeared that all that was left was obtaining the Splintered Winter's Wrath and doing the combine. As the wiki page stated, "Items with the 'Unraveling Enchantments' attribute are found in the The Tide Turns end chest and the quest chain reward list." To me that meant I needed to do that Tide Turns quest and GET MY LOOT!

The static group had that mission unlocked up to hard, and since I'm an insane soloing Sorcerer type, I thought I'd give it a shot with a Cleric henchman in tow. This ended badly on the very final fight since . . . well . . . my cleric and I both ran out of mana. I'd still like to solo this just to say I did, but at that point, there, hovering around as a defeated ghost, it occurred to me that . . . Hey, I wonder if this Splintered Winter's Wrath wand is in the auction house?

:)

You can see where I'm going with this . . . it *was* in the auction house. In fact I bought one for 900 plat, which seemed to be a bargain compared to the others up for sale.

WHEW. Now I had all my components, and I was ready for my final combine, which again was slightly confusing. I mean, I was left wondering, "Wait? Does the final combine happen in the Tide Turns instance or does it happen out in the House Deneith City Area?" Because all it tells you on that wiki page is "Combine this item in 'Visbane's Folly' atop Sentinel's Tower in House Deneith Enclave . . ."


The answer was, as it turns out, yup, in the House Deneith City area there is a little grassy ramp that leads up to the top of the Sentinel's Tower. It's just kind of hidden off to the east of the tower.

I did my combine . . .


And I got my upgraded weapon.


Whew.

Sadly, after all that work, the stats look great in pixels, but color me a little unimpressed in practice. HAHA. The damage output seems a little weak, but it is nice to add another eternal wand to my collection and at least it seems it's one of the only AoE attacks from an eternal wand before 20th level. It'll also be good to swap in this wand if I'm casting any lower level cold spells for a little boost to damage.


It's cool lookin' and looks like you could roast two hotdogs at once with it. WOOHOO! I'll keep it. :) (plus it appears at max level you can upgrade this thing even MORE and make it truly Epic)

Happy Dueling!

Last Day of Risia Ice Games 2010-2011

So, I’ve been playing a lot, and I mean A LOT, of Dungeons and Dragons Online lately.

It all started when the Risia games hit Stormreach, and I had been doing my best to earn those stinking tokens. It's funny but this was actually a learning experience for me in more ways than one. It also made me realize exactly how steep the learning curve is in this game . . . all from a simple exercise in jumping for tokens.

When you look at the history of the game, DDO really has been around for many years . . . 2006 in fact. It doesn't feel that way for me though since I really didn't start playing until it went free-to-play. What I didn't realize, or give respect to, was that people have been playing this game all along, and there are still people playing this game who jumped on board back in 2006.

I remember when it first launched my friend Tony asked me to come play with a few of his friends there, and I turned him down because I was having a hard enough time justifying the expense of an Everquest subscription. All it took was it going free to play; yeah, I'm that cheap. BUT WAIT! I'M NOT! For Christmas my wife sprung and bought be $50 worth of DDO tokens. WOOT!

I digress.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, the Risia Games!

So, the Risia games apparently are almost as ancient as DDO itself. Every holiday season, people don there ice skates and zoom around on large ramps collecting coins that can be redeemed for awesome stuff. The people in the know make bank. The people who aren’t in the know or don’t care to be in the know, lose bank.

I fancy myself as one of the fast ones of the slow group this year. I did get a +5 Ray of Frost and a cool ice damage weapon after all.



You see, all the hubbub centers around these “motes” that you get from redeeming coins from your ice escapades. You use motes to do things like add damage to a weapon or create an eternal Ray of Frost wand. It’s some reasonably cool stuff. You’ll hear people in the trade channel auctioning off “icy burst kits.” Basically these kits are everything you need to progress your way through all the combines at the ice forge you need to make an uber weapon. It’s like three recipes and 300 motes, and these things go for tens of thousands of plat.



I’ve learned a few things from my fascination with collecting these little coins and motes. I even worked out a cool system of grabbing three white coins and a blue coin, logging out my character, logging on another character and grabbing two more coins before the coins had respawned for my first character. It was kind of fun, until . . .

Until?

Until, a guild mate told me how he and some friends were gaining purple coins in a kind of cheap way. A blue coin is better than a white coin, but the purple coin rules them all with its reward. Basically they were having a high-level person teleport them to a spot where you could easily feather fall down to grab the purple coin over and over and over. I didn’t take his invitation to do this because it just irritated me. Here I was trying to work out some snazzy system of grabbing the junk coins while unbeknownst to me, you could get it some cheap cheating way. GAH! Just irritating to know that I had spent all that time being stupid and thinking I was cool when this dude was OWNING everything with a high level clicky.

That’s when it hit me. I’m a low leveler, and I suck. Sure, I felt a power surge when I found out I could cast a firewall and trick mobs into running back and forth in my fire while I was invisible . . . but I’m still just a ninth level sorcerer wannabe.

In retrospect, I should have swallowed my irritation and just joined my random guild mate in the cheat way of gaining purple coins. Seriously, I should have because it’d be great to reap the rewards. But, I have to say it would be MUCH MUCH cooler to earn a purple coin the legit way . . . even if I’m not a monk who can do these fantastic jumps. Check this insanity out:


By the very last day of the Risia Ice Games I finally figured out that strength modifies jump. /smacks head. HEY! DON'T LAUGH! I'm a sorcerer, ok? I don't know these things. I rock the firewall and invisible farming scheme I got going on, remember? Not smashin' heads and jumping walls. Well, I do have the jump spell in my arsenal now.

Perhaps next year it'll be me with the uber teleport clicky helping out guild mates get purple coins, eh?

I was just happy to finally make it to the third ramp by the last day. The fourth and final ramp eluded me.

Next year, you're mine, purple coins!

(I did make about 20k plat off of this, so . . . you know . . . awesome for this little ninth level sorcerer. ;p)