Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Solo/ no repeats experiment in DDO

As I mentioned previously, my goal in DDO was to see how far I could get solo without repeating content. As of last night, I have concluded that it's around level six and three bubbles. I could have maybe squeaked out some more levels by banging my head on level 7 content, but that's kind of a losing proposition because I'd have to start in on level 8 and 9 content with fewer abilities to get through level 7.

I have done all the free quests I could find wandering around, and bought nearly every adventure pack with content for level six and lower. One area that I messed up was not getting anal enough about doing wilderness deeds earlier. For example, I would leave most wilderness areas long before I had even reached 400 kills, which is leaving a lot of XP behind. I also didn't start getting really anal about exploration points until level four or so. I imagine I might have been able to make it as far as 7 or 8 if I had planned better.

Still, it's not as if I don't have a ton of things to do. The loot that you get doing certain quest chains varies pretty wildy from one run to the next, and so it's fun repeating them just to see what rewards you get offered. I'm also not having to repeat a lot in the first place. When I got stuck at level six, I went back and gunned through an old five quest chain twice, and viola I was seven and change.

So far I have been able to get by on my Paladin using zero hirelings completely solo. There have only been a few quests I couldn't get through if I was doing them at the correct level, and those were mainly quests hardwired to require a group. For example, in one quest four switches have to be activated at the same time in different parts of an instance.

I have to say rumors of DDO nearly requiring a party seem to be exaggerated. There hasn't been a ton I couldn't do solo. Though, admittedly, this is on a 'toon designed to be a low level solo powerhouse. I imagine a greater proportion of content will lock me out at higher levels, but so far my options don't seem nearly as limited and repetitive as I had feared. The one caveat is that I needed to buy adventure packs, the free content is quite limited from level four on.

5 comments:

  1. At some point I am going to play some DDO. From what I remember of the leveling system in DDO it seems to me that level 6 worth of content is quite a bit.

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  2. Very interesting, Yeebo. Getting that far does seem to be a lot of content. Especially if you didn't repeat anything. Now that I have a new graphics card, I'll have to check out DDO (and LotRO) again.

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  3. It is a fair bit of content. The pace of leveling really starts to slow after four, so nearly to seven without repeats is pretty good.

    I'd guess that there is enough content to do at least half of each level in new areas, which is very different from the launch game I read about.

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  4. Is the content fun also up to that point? Are some of them fun even if they would be repeated?

    I have a bard which is almost level 3 now and bought a few of the adventure packs, but have not started any of them yet.
    I quite like the puzzle-like approach some of the missions have, but the hit-all-crates-for-loot things gets a bit old I think. However, missions where puzzles provide the fun might not be that good being repeated.

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  5. @Sente: if you like the free content, you'll probably like the adventure packs better. Like the free content, some rely a lot more heavilly on puzzles than others.

    As far as being fun to repeat, I'd say a lot more so than the content in a typical MMO. The fact that quest rewards are often randomized helps a lot.

    The puzzle based ones can lose some of their luster on subsequent run throughs. However it depends on the puzzle. For example, I recently came across the great grandaddy of all tile puzzles. I imagine it would remain challenging every time, it's simply too large to memorize all the steps.

    Fun is subjective of course, but I have one level seven and a level four coming up and I'm still haveing a lot of fun.

    And agreed, smashing every crate in sight does get old. I generally just leave them when I'm repeating an instance for XP.

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