So you’ve decided to give Dungeons and Dragons Online a try, and maybe you’ve even decided to buy some Turbine Points. In this post I will describe the races, and classes that are available with Turbine Points, and why they might (or might not) be worth buying; in future posts I’ll talk about account options and adventure packs I’ve tried.

A quick note about pricing: if you buy points in the largest batch possible, they cost about a penny each. You get comparatively fewer points for your dollar with smaller bundles; conversely, sometimes they’re on sale. Keep this in mind when considering prices.

First, races. DDO comes with the standard races available automatically — this includes humans, dwarves, halflings, and elves. There are two races available in the store: Drow and Warforged.

Drow are probably quite familiar if you’ve played any D&D-based game before. The Drow in DDO aren’t alignment-restricted so you can, for example, play a Drow Monk or Paladin if you like. From a rules perspective, Drow start with +2 to Dexterity, Intelligence, and Charisma, and -2 to Constitution. They are also immune to sleep and have higher saves against spell effects, innate spell resistance, and enhanced abilities with rapiers, shortswords, and shurikens. This makes them a natural choice for classes such as rogue, wizard, and bard, finesse-based dual wielders, and the like.

Drow cost 795 points, but can also be unlocked on a per-server basis by getting 400 favor with any other character. You can easily do this solo by level 7 or so, so unless you are desperate to start with a Drow as your first character, there is no need to buy this race right away.

Warforged are unique to the Eberron setting. They are a living construct made of metal and wood. As such they are quite tough and are immune to a lot of inconvenient effects. They can’t wear armor, but their body can be augmented to be just as strong, with added damage resistance besides. The biggest disadvantages of Warforged are that their Wisdom and Charisma suck, and that healing spells don’t work very well on them; instead, you need to use items and spells of Repair. But since the Repair spells are learned by arcane casters, this means that Warforged make very survivable Wizards and Sorcerers, as they can heal themselves just like a Cleric of any other race could.

Warforged are unlocked only by purchase or by subscribing to the game. They cost 595 points and are well worth it for Wizard and Sorcerer builds, and are not bad for any other tough build that doesn’t rely on Wisdom or Charisma.

Now, to the classes. As with races, there are plenty of options without buying anything — you automatically get most of the D&D standards, with the conspicuous exception of Druids, who aren’t in DDO at all yet. The classes available for purchase are the Monk and Favored Soul.

The Monk is a self-sufficient martial artist with many special abilities. They are uniquely potent at unarmed combat and gain bonuses to attack and movement speed, damage, and defense as they level up, but in return they cannot wear armor or use most weapons.

Monks in DDO have a lot of active combat skills. They use a resource called Ki which is gained by attacking and spent on special attacks, combos, and finishing moves that do extra damage, buff the party, or debuff the enemy. They can choose to follow either a light or dark path; the dark path gives more damage and debuffs, while the light path allows for self and party healing. If you like fast moving, mobile, clicky combat the Monk is a lot of fun, and quite hardy.

Monks are only available by subscribing or by buying them for 795 points. If you like their style of combat and plan to play a pure monk they are worth the buy (mine is my favorite character so far), but if you only want them to splash a level or two into a multiclass, wait for them to be on sale.

Favored Souls are to the Cleric what the Sorcerer is to the Wizard. That is, while Clerics learn every divine spell and can select which ones they have prepared every time they rest, Favored Souls learn only a small set but can cast them much more often. Because DDO uses a spell point system instead of spells-per-day this is somewhat less of a difference than it is in pencil-and-paper D&D or in NWN2; here, the best reason to pick a Favored Soul or Sorcerer is because you know what spells you need and want a much larger spell point pool to cast them with. I’m not a big fan of the spontaneous caster classes so I don’t have much else to say on this point.

Favored Soul is unlocked on a per-server basis for 2500 favor on a single character; this is not likely to happen until you have another character at endgame already, so if you really want to play a Favored Soul, buying it for 795 points is probably worth doing.

Next post: account options, and whether 4 extra build points are worth $15.

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Why I Like Dungeons and Dragons Online

by rob on April 24, 2010

in Gaming

If you follow me on Twitter, you probably already know that my favorite game of the moment is Dungeons and Dragons Online. I had originally tried it way back at launch and thought it had potential, but given that it was exclusively group-focused at that time, I thought I’d probably find it frustrating. Last fall, when it went free-to-play, I (like a lot of other people, I’m sure) revisited it and found it much improved and a lot of fun.

DDO, for me, scratches two gaming itches at once, which I will refer to as the “Builder” itch and the “Diablo” itch. The first of those is my love of interesting and detailed character customization, which DDO excels in due to its use of the D&D/D20 ruleset instead of something more like other MMOs. The D20 rules reward planning ahead and allow free multiclassing — while it’s easy to screw up if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s also possible to build interesting hybrid characters. Another side effect of their use of the actual D&D rules is that you can apply your knowledge of the ruleset from outside the game, if you’re familiar with it from other sources such as the books or from playing Neverwinter Nights (another favorite of mine). (And if you want to know the backstory of the world DDO is set in, there are books about that too.)

The other thing I like about DDO is that it feels more like a hack and slash CRPG than most MMOs do. Combat feels a lot more active than the typical “auto-attack with interspersed skill usage, burn down one target at a time” that is typical of the genre. Movement and position matter, and the enemies know this just as well as the players — you can dodge incoming spells and missiles, roll around to flank your target, and so forth, but at the same time, enemy casters and archers will try to kite and agile meleers will hit-and-run. Plus, instead of more powerful single enemies, often a tougher encounter simply means a larger horde of mooks, which means nonstop carnage and a lot of hacky, slashy AoE fun.

The world of DDO is reminiscent of Guild Wars rather than a more typical MMO, in that it is highly instanced with handcrafted missions and outdoor areas. You don’t get experience points just from killing things. Advancement always comes from completing objectives, even in outdoor exploration areas. Finishing a quest gives a chunk of XP no matter how you manage to do it, with bonuses and penalties applied for such things as killing everything (or sneaking past it all to gank the boss), disarming all the traps, not dying, and so forth. Quests come in multiple difficulty levels suitable for soloists and groups, with a corresponding scaling of rewards, and you can repeat them as often as you like. One unique bit of fluff in DDO’s quest system is that there is a narrator who serves as the dungeon master, occasionally describing things as you progress — and like real DMs, the ones in game occasionally do badly acted NPC voices, pronounce names differently from one another, and so forth. In one particular quest chain, the voice of the DM is even provided by the late Gary Gygax…

Another point about DDO worth mentioning is that because of its subscription-based origins, it isn’t as big a money suck as some free-to-play games. You can still subscribe to get access to everything, but if you don’t you can buy content in chunks and once you buy it, it’s unlocked on all servers forever, so it’s possible to make a one-time purchase and never pay again, or more likely, spread out a bunch of smaller buys as you level up. There is no need to constantly purchase consumables, as in some “free” games, and there is plenty of free content at low levels to keep a typical player busy for a while (especially one who likes trying different classes).

All in all, I highly recommend DDO for anyone who wants a somewhat different MMO experience — and all it costs to try it is a download.

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Tricksy Hobbitses: The Gambling Burglar

November 4, 2009

Way back at the launch of Lord of the Rings Online, the first character I stuck with past the early levels was a Hobbit Burglar. He was one of two (the other being a Loremaster) I hit the level cap with, right around the time Evendim was released. But then I set him aside in [...]

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Back To Middle-Earth

August 30, 2009

I’ve been playing Lord of the Rings Online again. Although I take breaks from time to time, I’ve been at it consistently since launch. I have a lifetime subscription, so there really isn’t any pressure to keep playing or stop paying, like with other MMOs. Recently, I hit the level cap on a third character, [...]

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Emacs As An External Editor On Mac OS X

August 20, 2009

For many years, Emacs has had client-server support so that you can leave it running all the time while allowing external applications to open files in it as needed. But that doesn’t work with GUI applications on the Mac, since they generally don’t know how to call an editor using the shell. Instead, most Mac [...]

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Zogan’s Big Weekend

September 8, 2008

Last time, I mentioned that I had rerolled my Illusionist. Zogan the Ratonga has been grinding his way through the tier 3 zones since then with combat experience turned off, so that I can take the game a bit slower. Later on this slows things down too much, but in the 20s you still level [...]

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Wait, I Changed My Mind

August 28, 2008

For someone who takes forever to make even the simplest decision, I can be tremendously fickle when it comes to MMOs, at least until I’ve made a commitment. Elithia, the character I wrote about just one post ago, is gone. Okay, maybe not gone, but mothballed until I need her slot for something else. Instead, [...]

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EverQuest 2: On Being An Illusionist

August 25, 2008

Meet Elithia. She’s one of my EverQuest 2 characters — not my main but currently my favorite alt. She’s an Illusionist, in her mid-20s as I write this, and does Provisioning as a trade skill. It took me quite a while to decide on her class, because EQ2 has so many options it can be [...]

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Falling Damage

June 9, 2008

What do you get when you combine free-for-all PvP, collision detection so players can’t walk through one another, and mounted combat? Perhaps something like this, from Age of Conan: Ouch.

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Sylva’s Links For Bear Druid Cubs

June 3, 2008

Recently my WoW guild (The Shortbread Army) made a group effort to start characters on the Horde side. For me, and probably others, this was a great excuse to try out a class or two that we had never played extensively before. Since my main on the Alliance side is a bear druid and a [...]

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