Dungeons & Dragons Online is a free to play MMORPG that I tried at the beginning of February and have been hooked ever since. (This is the first time I’ve opened the dope for weeks.)
Totally free to play, though you can buy stuff if you like. The must-have upgrades can be unlocked for free through grinding if you want to stay completely free to play.
Anyone here play?
I’m an officer in a tiny guild of newbies on the Argonnessen server under the names Ellischalice and Ellistempest, drop me a line anytime if you’d like to join.
Not actively. I’ve got the game, have a couple of characters, haven’t gotten past level 9 yet. There are many things I love about the game, the main thing being I can play a trap monkey rogue (although I’ve been told they’re semi-useless at high level).
One of my characters is a tempest trapmonkey (Ellistempest) that will be a functional trapmonkey and respectable damage-dealing melee character all the way through endgame. Not my build, obviously, but one I found on the forums, and it’s a hoot and a half to play.
My other character (Ellischalice) is a lockpicking paladin. heh.
EDIT: The thing I find so remarkable about the game is not only that it’s totally free, but it’s a real actual computer game that my 2007 budget-box Dell with no video card (on-board motherboard graphics chip) can actually play. It lags in common areas, but in dungeons it’s fine.
Ever since my love affair with WoW cooled off, I have been wandering about for something to fill the void. I had been playing LoTRO fairly steady, then I picked DDO up on a whim a few weeks back.
The only thing that is keeping me from playing this game non-stop, is the fact that we had to move to a new apartment last week. I liked the game enough that I threw some $$$ at it when they had their double bonus point sale last week.
I too am playing a Tempest Trapmonkey on Thelanis and am having a blast. I was also able to crowbar the game onto my Acer Revo (think Netbook in a Desktop form). So now I’m able to dual-box this game with my main gaming rig. I created a little one man guild with a silly name using six F2P accounts. (it seems the six is the sweet-spot for bonus renown)
What I like most about the game right now is that I can play in very short bursts as time allows. In WoW or LoTRO, it would always take me 30mins to get going due to travel time, inventory management and trying to remember where I was at with my quest. With DDO, I can hop on and clear 2 or 3 dungeons in the same amount of time. So I’m able to make meaningful progress in the game on the fly as RL permits.
heh, we’re practically the same person. Started at the same time, same character build, and I also threw $20 down for the double bonus points last week, which is remarkable as the first time I’ve ever paid money for an online game.
My plan is to save those precious points for adventure packs, since that’s more actual content. I can’t imagine a shared bank account or other races/classes would be anywhere near as useful.
My original character was built very poorly, got up to level 6 and made a killing at the auction. (~12k platinum.) So he’s been “twinking” out my other two characters with the best gear their level allows as I bring them up slowly.
As a (basically) free to play account, I did some research on making the most of the potential xp. Looks like a simple and effective way to go is to run each quests twice on each difficulty (skipping casual) and only run quests that are 1 level below you, factoring in that hard adds a level to the quest and elite adds two levels.
I had a little more room in my MMO budget, so I grabbed the bundle that contains the Half races and the 32pt builds. I know that some of that can eventually be unlocked for free, but I know me. The kinds of toons I want to build would benefit from those unlocks.
I plan on spending the rest of my points on quest packs, using this post as a guide. Since I will likely solo my first character, I will be avoiding the packs that might not be solo friendly (catacombs, from what I’ve read is bad for solo).
I hadn’t read much about the best way to squeeze out XP. I had only been running the quests once on each difficulty level. Since I’m still very low, the levels have come quickly. I expect I’ll switch up to your method when things start slowing down.
Here’s the page on experience points and efficient ways to earn them, efficient in terms of both getting the most out of each quest and getting the best bang for your buck time-wise.
Here’s a good table of the adventure packs. It doesn’t have any of the narrative descriptions like the thread you found (great link!) but it does have all of them listed in a nice table along with their value in terms of favor per dollar spent as well as xp available per dollar spent. (Per turbine points, actually, but same difference.)