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.

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.

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 favor of the LM, and by the time I came back to him — after Moria, and after capping a Guardian and Captain, I found that things had changed so much I hardly knew what to do any more.

A couple of months ago, with nothing better to do while waiting for Mirkwood, I decided to start over with a new Burglar and relearn the class from scratch — and I discovered that it’s my favorite again, although it’s not the same class it used to be at launch. The biggest change, and the one I want to talk about in this post, is the Gambler trait line. The Gambler line can increase the Burglar’s capability quite a lot, but only with heavy reliance on chance. This trait line is especially unusual because it doesn’t just enhance game mechanics that already exist for the Burglar — it adds something new, which the class doesn’t have at all without at least one Gambler trait.

That new mechanic is the Gamble, which is a short duration debuff that has a random power level, and has a random chance of being applied when you use certain Burglar skills. The deeper you trait into the Gambler line, the more skills have a chance to apply a Gamble, and the better that chance gets.

In the previous paragraph I mentioned that gambles have a random power level. Whenever you apply a gamble, the game rolls a number from 1-6 which determines how powerful the gamble is. (If you roll a 6, the corresponding sound effect is a nice “cha-ching!” which is always nice to hear during a tough fight!) A tier 1 gamble is generally quite weak and useful mainly for enabling other bonuses, while a tier 6 Gamble is very strong. There are three kinds of gamble:

A debuffing gamble is a 15-second offensive debuff, similar to the Disable trick. At tier 1 it debuffs for +15% attack duration, and at tier 6, it provides +20% miss chance, +40% attack duration and -30% damage. And in case you want to reduce the enemy to complete helplessness, it stacks with Disable, too.

A damaging gamble does damage over time, 5 ticks over 15 seconds. The exact amount of damage scales to your level, but at level 60 it does 35 common damage per tick at tier 1, and 140 per tick at tier 6.

Finally, a disabling gamble is a daze, and is what gives the Gambler line one of its most useful abilities. Unlike Riddle, the daze from a disabling gamble works on any enemy type, like the Loremaster’s Blinding Flash. It also can have a long duration — it starts at 15 seconds for tier 1, and at tier 6 it lasts for a full minute!

One thing that can be a bit confusing to new Burglars, and is not explained too well inside the game, is that when you land a disabling gamble, a debuff that looks like a yellow star appears on the enemy, and the tooltip just says “Disabling Gamble”. What actually happens is that the daze is applied separately, in case the enemy is immune or it ends early. The yellow “Disabling Gamble” debuff is a placeholder which is used so that you get the full 15 seconds to use other bonuses that depend on a gamble being present.

The chance to apply a gamble from stealth (for the skills that allow that) begins at 60%, and the chance to apply one during combat starts at a measly 25%. But under the right conditions, you can add up to 70% to those chances; a level 60 Gambler with good legendary items can be assured of a fairly consistently landing gambles, although how effective they are is still up to the dice.

Traits

As I mentioned above, the gamble mechanic is not used at all unless you have at least one trait in the Gambler line. Now, I’d like to talk about what those traits are and how they work together. In addition to enabling the use of gambles, the Gambler line is useful for enhancing your stealth and Fellowship Maneuver roles.

If you are only going to have one Gambler trait, that one is Leaf-Walker. Not only does it add 20% to speed in stealth — a universally useful buff, I’d say — but it also grants the chance to apply a disabling gamble from stealth when you use Provoke. Even if you spec down one of the other trait lines, using a spare slot on this gives you a very nice added crowd control ability, and you only need one legacy (+% Gamble Chance) on your tools to raise that chance to around 75% or more. Leaf-Walker takes a while to get — use Hide In Plain Sight 250 times — so get started early.

Another generally useful trait is Side-Step, which gives additional evade rating. At level 60 it adds +720, which on my level 60 Burglar corresponds to 4.4% evade and 0.9% partial evade. Nice for soloing and PvMP, especially with the Stick and Move legendary which opens your critical response skills when you evade.

With two traits in the Gambler line, you get a chance to apply a debuffing gamble when you use Clever Retort. This isn’t terribly useful by itself, but if you were going to have two Gambler traits anyway, a chance at that big debuff is nice.

If you’re going to be using Clever Retort anyway, the next trait should help: Honed Wit decreases its cooldown by 30 seconds (to 1m 30s), and allows you to use it all the time, instead of just in Mischief. Clever Retort is a trick-removal skill that does one of four random things based on Fellowship Maneuvers — direct damage, damage over time, healing (only for the Burglar) and power restoration (ditto). While the randomness means it isn’t always useful, you should still be using it often if you’re a Gambler, for the debuff.

Three traits in the Gambler line add the chance of a damaging gamble to Startling Twist, and also add bonus damage to Surprise Strike (around 200 points at level 60) when you strike a gambled target. This is only one of several bonuses that require you to land a gamble first.

Continuing the theme of debuffing a gambled target, Cruel Odds gives your Burglars Advantage and Double-Edged Strike (critical chain) skills a 10% chance to add a small critical vulnerability debuff to their target. If the target has a gamble, this chance becomes 25%. The debuff is only a couple of percent, but it stacks with Counter Defence and applies to everyone attacking the target.

At four traits in the Gambler line, the final bonus opens up: Mischevious Glee gains a chance to apply a disabling gamble. Heal yourself and put an enemy to sleep at the same time! Also, whenever you get a devastating critical, you get a buff which increases your gamble chance by 40%. At first this buff lasts 30 seconds but you can prolong it with a legacy; if you’re lucky, you can keep it up almost all the time.

Next up, we have Swift and Subtle, which increases Subtle Stab damage by 10% and, if you use it on a gambled target, applies a debuff to its resistances. Like the Cruel Odds debuff, this affects all attackers, so while the debuff amount is small (around 1%, if memory serves) it may be more useful than it looks.

Related to Leaf-Walker is Footpad, which increases your stealth level by +2 and adds the chance to apply a debuffing gamble from stealth when you Burgle. The usefulness of this trait is debatable. It’s often hard to tell whether adding stealth levels does anything at all, and you can get at least +6 more from gear which is probably more than enough for PvE. And since Burgle only works on a subset of enemies, the extra debuff is only situationally useful. But if you’re going 5 deep in the Gambler line, you might as well take it.

The final two traits in the Gambler line affect Fellowship Maneuvers, and to be honest I’ve never used them and probably never will. But for completeness, here they are. Overwhelming Odds gives you a buff after you complete a Fellowship Maneuver, with the nature of the buff depending on what color was most prominent in the FM, and Even the Odds lowers the cooldowns of your post-Fellowship-Maneuver reactive skills to 15 minutes and adds a +50% gamble chance buff when you use them. I’m not sure either of these are worth a trait slot, but there you go.

With five traits in the Gambler line you can use the capstone legendary trait, Dealing’s Done. Like the other two capstone traits, Dealing’s Done enhances one of the three 5-minute-cooldown critical response skills, in this case Lucky Strike. Lucky Strike normally just applies a damaging gamble. With this trait it becomes Gambler’s Strike, has only a 1 minute cooldown and if the target already has a gamble, that gamble will be upgraded to tier 6 and have its duration refreshed. That includes applying a 60 second daze if the target still has the yellow “disabling gamble” debuff! With a legacy, you can reduce the cooldown of Gambler’s Strike to 15-30 seconds, too.

Legendary Items

There are several Legendary Item legacies which relate directly to the Gambler:

The main legacy you should look for, even if you have only the Leaf-Walker trait for extra mezzing capability, is +% Gamble Chance. This goes up to at least 16-18% on second age tools, and may go to 20% on a first age (I’m not lucky enough to have one of those to check!).

Also on your tools, +X Gambler Devastating Critical Buff lengthens the +40% gamble chance buff you get from a devastating crit (with 4 Gambler traits). It doesn’t take a lot of points to level, so even at a low tier you can get an extra 10 or 12 seconds on the buff without investing heavily.

Finally, -X Lucky Strike Cooldown, found on weapons, does exactly what it says on the label. This is useful only if you use Dealing’s Done, and even then it isn’t a requirement — most of the time you won’t need to use Gambler’s Strike more than once a minute. I wouldn’t prioritize this over the other useful weapon legacies, but if you do get it, it’s worth tossing some points into, and relatively cheap.

Besides those, most of the same legacy choices apply to the Gambler as to other kinds of Burglar: Positional Damage, Critical Response Skill Damage, Skill Critical Multiplier, and so forth. Subtle Stab Critical Multiplier goes well with Swift and Subtle, too.

Play Style

As a Gambler you should get used to constantly applying and removing tricks. Well, that’s a useful thing to do for every Burglar, but as a Gambler you will be just as interested in the secondary effects as the primary ones. Most of the time, you should try to keep some kind of gamble on the enemy all the time, even if it’s not necessarily useful, so you and your group can take advantage of the various debuffs and bonuses you get with a gambled target. Even a low-tier gamble does something, after all.

On tougher enemies, you may want to hold your Clever Retort until you get a devastate, then use it to land a debuffing gamble which you then upgrade immediately with Gambler’s Strike.

Similarly, if you’re fighting a group, consider switching to a secondary target after a devastate and using Mischevious Glee to daze it, especially if you can use Gambler’s Strike to extend the daze to 60 seconds. If you’re soloing and you need to use Glee to heal yourself, listen closely for the “dazed” sound effect and if you hear it, immediately switch targets and/or turn off autoattack (turning your back also works). While the higher tier disabling gambles give you a couple of seconds before the daze breaks, lower tier ones are susceptable to being broken immediately if you’re not careful.

If you’re grouped with a Gambler, expect them to do the same things other Burglars do — stab the enemy from behind and distribute debuffs. If your Burglar has Leaf-Walker, keep in mind that while they can provide extra crowd control, even the best Gambler usually still has a small chance that the disabling gamble won’t land, nor any control over how long it is. If you’re burning down one enemy at a time, watch the adds in case the Burglar dazes one; the visual effect for a disabling gamble is kind of hard to see, certainly much less obvious than a LM’s Blinding Flash.

Conclusion

I hope this article has explained the Gambler a little better; I know I was pretty confused by it when I first saw the new traits, but now that I’ve played my new Burglar for a while, I just love this trait line, because it keeps me on my toes and simply feels very “Burglar-ish” in how you never quite know what’s going to happen until you sneak around and try it. Although I enjoy a lot of classes, I think my Burglar is the most fun, and will probably be my main for a long time.

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, this time the Loremaster I started way back at launch (the other two are a Captain and a Guardian who are much more recent). To celebrate, I started a new alt today…

Meet Zogard (I already have a “Zogan”), the Hobbit Minstrel. I’m leveling him in Bree-Land instead of the Shire as one would expect, because Bree-Land has recently been revamped and I wanted an excuse to try the newly reorganized content. For his trade I chose Yeoman (cooking and farming) because, after all, a smart hobbit knows that when he goes on an adventure, he will meet few people who appreciate the need for six square meals a day like his fellow hobbits, and he had better learn to feed himself as a matter of self-preservation.

The Minstrel class in LOTRO is a healer — the healer before the Moria expansion. The primary conceit of the Minstrel is that he raises the morale of his fellows and demoralizes his enemies through the power of music and song. Like the primary healers in other fantasy MMOs, he’s usually lightly armored, provides buffs, and has plenty of offensive casting abilities for the solo grind.

Where the Minstrel differs from other healers I have played is in how his skills are structured. The Minstrel is a very active, button-pushy class, which I think is supposed to represent how he constantly plays and sings while his fellows are fighting. He has a bunch of Ballad skills, each of which casts instantly and cools down in seconds; each one does a small amount of damage and gives the party a very short-term buff, just ten to fifteen seconds long. These Ballads are also arranged in tiers, so once you play a Tier 1 Ballad you have ten seconds to play a Tier 2, then ten seconds to play a Tier 3, then ten seconds to play one of the powerful Anthems.

The idea seems to be that while you’re between heals, or while you’re soloing, you are constantly cycling different ballads in order to keep the damage flowing and buffs up (EQ1 bard, anyone?). It’s the busiest I’ve ever been in LOTRO, and so far I like it, although I still often forget that the Minstrel is not as impervious to damage as a heavy armor wearer or even the Loremaster with her pet and debuffs.

At any rate, Zogard is currently level 14 which represents one evening of play (the early levels go by in a flash these days), and he’s about halfway through the Bree-Land quests. I haven’t noticed many changes yet, but the early quests in the zone were always fairly straightforward and didn’t need much in the way of improvement. Will I make it to 60 as a Minstrel? Hard to say at this point…

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 apps that support external text editors use the ODB Editor Suite created by Bare Bones Software, which extends the normal Mac “open file” event with the ability for the editor to tell the calling app when it’s done.

Support for the ODB protocol isn’t built into Emacs, but it’s basically the same as using emacsclient from the shell. So without further ado, here is “EditorClient”, a small shim application which acts like an ODB editor but actually opens files in Emacs. All it does is intercept the “open file” event and call emacsclient. When you’re done editing the file (C-x # or server-edit in Emacs) it responds to the ODB client application which can then update its contents. If you use a non-Mac port of Emacs for some reason, you can probably also associate files with it in the Finder to make for easier double-click editing. (The Mac ports of Emacs can do that themselves; they just don’t have the special handling for ODB events.)

This is really sort of a quick and dirty hack; it’s only for Leopard and the emacsclient call is hard-coded to use the one in the /Applications/Emacs.app bundle. I’ll try to improve it later, but I’m posting it now in case anyone else out there is looking for something like this.

Download it here: EditorClient.zip (20.98 KB)

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 at a reasonable pace through questing while having time to enjoy the story.

As Zogan approached 30, I was recruited by a guild, Aventura. So far they are pretty cool, and this weekend was a flurry of activity as I did some of my first group content with them.

Being in a guild is somewhat more important in EQ2 than in most other games. In addition to the usual things like a chat channel and guild bank, guilds in EQ2 have levels (up to 80, just like players) which open up an ever-expanding set of perks for their members. Most of these are based on Status, which is a sort of secondary currency which you earn from faction grinding and major quest lines. As you earn Status to spend on buying guild and faction rewards, it serves as experience for your guild. Some of the rewards include mounts — faster than those available for cash alone, or discounted from the cash price — bigger houses, housing decorations, and titles of nobility. Zogan is already thinking about moving out of his quaint little studio in the Baubbleshire…

This weekend, several of us from Aventura ran the Nektropos Castle instance to finish the Heritage quest (HQ) The Missing Mask. Heritage quests are those major quest lines I mentioned above. They are always long and require a group, but the reward is worth it: not only do you get lots of experience and status, but you also get a new version of a well known EQ1 item with excellent stats. And if you don’t want to use the item, you can convert it into a trophy to be displayed in your house.

The first HQ I did was Return of the Light, which I was able to solo until the end. That one consisted mostly of running around killing various named mobs, charging up a Lightstone so that its stats improved each time. For the last part, I went with a pickup group to the final battle, which involved waves of orcs followed by General Drull. All in all, it was pretty easy. The Missing Mask, not so much…

Nektropos Castle, as an instance, is exactly what it sounds like: a castle with multiple levels, towers in the corners, narrow hallways surrounding a big courtyard, and so forth. As any good dungeon should have, it has lots of “bosses” and a whole bunch of quests to finish. We did maybe half of the quests while we were there this time, and Zogan got two levels and four achievement points — not bad at all.

The Missing Mask is an example of annoying quest design, however. At one point, it requires you to kill a monster named Billy twice, once in the game room and once in the chapel, in that order. The problem is that he has multiple spawn points in the castle, so if he’s at the wrong one, you only have two choices: reset the instance (which you can do as often as you like, thankfully) or kill him and wait 20 minutes for him to possibly spawn somewhere else. It took probably an hour of instance resets to get both of these kills done.

Later on, you have to talk to a guy. The problem with this is that he despawns as soon as someone talks to him, and you have to wait five minutes for him to come back. So you either stand around for half an hour while each member of your group talks to him one at a time, or you try to time it so you all click him within the time window between the first person’s click and when he actually despawns. What fun… and by “fun”, I mean “annoyance”. We started at around 8pm, I think, and finished at 1:30. But we finished, at least.

This is also one of the first chances I’ve had to use the in-game voice chat in EQ2, and I’m impressed with it… it’s a lot smoother and nicer sounding than the WoW voice chat (which hardly anyone uses anyway), and has more features than the voice system Lord of the Rings. Only one thing about it annoys me: it lowers the game audio whenever anyone is talking, and there is no way to adjust or disable that. I have a separate headset specifically so that voice doesn’t interfere with game audio, so I hope they add a way to tweak this in the future.

Next: Zogan is in tier 4, finally, and he’s off to the Enchanted Lands to help the halflings, or to Zek to kill hundreds of orcs.

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, I decided to start over with a Ratonga Illusionist. Every time I played Elithia I kept thinking much I’d rather be playing another Ratonga (I have two others, and I really like the race for some reason). The only thing holding me back was the High Elf racial slow fall ability — and ultimately I realized that it doesn’t matter, since it doesn’t work when you’re on a mount anyway.

So, I started over with a new Ratonga Illusionist named Zogan. Actually, he started as a Coercer, since Rats are an evil-aligned race. But that’s no obstacle in EverQuest 2, because you can always switch sides. Being able to change factions is one of the things made possible by not designing a game around PvP — there’s no competitive advantage to being able to do it, so there is no reason to prohibit it.

Changing factions in EQ2 is not hard, but it can be somewhat time consuming. It begins in your home city, where you find a quest giver who is somewhat disenchanted with life there. In Zogan’s case, it was a fellow Ratonga whose tail had been cut off by the Freeport militia for fun. (Oh, the indignity! For Ratonga pride alone, Zogan could stay there no longer.)

The initial betrayal quest involved sneaking around the city by night to investigate the city guard, eavesdropping on conversations and planting Gnomish listening devices. Then, with the help of an expert forger, Zogan replaced the guard shift schedule with a new one, giving the resistance an opportunity to enter the militia headquarters with minimal opposition. Finally, inside the HQ, Zogan dispatched the guard captain (dying several times in the process due to recalcitrant coerced pets), freed a few prisoners, and left behind a couple of explosive devices for good measure. But the mission was not a complete success, for poor Zogan was captured on the way out and summarily ejected from the city (tail still intact, thankfully).

Having betrayed your home city, you find yourself in Haven, an underground town for those who have no home among the primary factions. Haven has no housing and no access to the shared bank, but other than that you could stay an exile forever if you don’t mind having both other factions hate you. Usually, Haven is just a temporary home while you build faction with someplace nicer.

From here, you can gain entrance to one of the other cities by doing tasks for them. You can even go back to the place you just betrayed, if you like. Zogan chose to join Kelethin, the city of the Fae, due to rumors that they are easier to impress than Qeynos. The rumors seem to have been true, as Zogan soon found soon found an Elf who would put in a good word for the low price of killing three orcs in a nearby camp.

After learning the Fae language and exterminating a goodly number of foul-smelling orcs, Zogan was sent to see the Queen of the Fae herself to gain citizenship. Truly, it felt strange to Zogan to be in a place where he wasn’t the smallest inhabitant! Before he could accept, however, he was informed that he could no longer practice Coercion, and would have to take up the related path of Illusionism. A high cost, to be sure, but worth it…

As I write this, Zogan is level 20, having just completed the beginning quests in Timorous Deep and his betrayal followed by a quick change of citizenship to Qeynos. (Kelethin is nice, but it’s too high up in the air, and falling off of it hurts!) I’ve decided to turn off experience gain from combat, so I can play through a couple of areas I’ve missed in the past without leveling too fast. More to come…

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 kind of overwhelming even if you’ve played MMOs for a while. EQ2 has a total of 24 classes, two variants of each of 12 base classes. For example, the Illusionist class is the good-aligned version of the Enchanter; the evil-aligned variant is the Coercer. You can switch between variants, provided you don’t mind moving to the opposite faction.

The Enchanter is, in all of EverQuest, a crowd-control mage. In EQ2 they are a pet class, and this is where one of the biggest difference between the variants shows up: the Coercer charms enemies as temporary pets, while the Illusionist gets a “persona” which looks just like them and casts similar types of spells. This puts the Enchanter between the other two extremes of the EQ2 mages — they aren’t completely reliant on their pet like the Summoners are, but they also don’t nuke as hard by themselves as the Sorcerers. Instead of sheer killing power, they have a large number of ways to disable, stun, and root the enemy, along with power management buffs which help out other group members.

Now, if you’ve ever played in an MMO with me, you’re probably thinking “Rob, what the hell are you doing playing a caster, especially one like that”. It’s true, I like melee, and that’s why my main in EQ2 is a Brigand. (I’ll talk more about him later.) But I’ve found that while I love soloing with a stealthy stabbing type of class, playing one in a group usually ends up driving me crazy. In groups, I’d rather be in the back where I can see what’s going on and react to it.

Allow me to digress a moment, and talk about the Loremaster class in Lord of the Rings Online. One of the reasons I like my Illusionist is that it feels most similar to the Loremaster, which is one of my favorite classes of any MMO I’ve tried. LOTRO faced a big limitation which most other fantasy MMOs don’t, and that’s the relative lack of flashy magic in Tolkien’s world. But they needed a class for people who like casters, so they came up with one which uses crowd control, pets which help you out but can’t tank, debuffs, and even the occasional melee strike to offset a lack of traditional nuking power. What they ended up with was a class that is very survivable as a soloer and is useful in groups, while requiring attention and tactics to play effectively. Enchanters in EQ2 remind me of that play style. (I haven’t found anything that feels the same in WoW.)

It took me a couple of weeks of playing both an Illusionist and Coercer to decide which variant I liked best. The Coercer reportedly becomes a very powerful soloer later in the game, but early on I found it somewhat more frustrating than the Illusionist. At low levels the Coercer’s charmed pets don’t last very long at all — and when the timer runs out, or a resistance check fails, they turn on you. I often found myself not even bothering with a pet, preferring to just root and nuke on my own much of the time. Perhaps I will change Elithia into a Coercer at a higher level when a more complete set of skills, as well as longer charms, are available.

I’d like to try to start blogging about what I do in EQ2, the way some other people write adventure logs for their characters, instead of just talking about design issues or random things I run across. That’s why I picked Elithia to talk about first — my main is at a higher level, so I’ve missed my chance to talk about lower level things on him.

So, what is Elithia up to? As I write this, she has just reached level 26. Her first 20 levels went by in a blur, questing among the Sarnak in the Timorous Deep. The TD starter zone is popular because of the quality of its quest rewards, but even now that the other areas have been upgraded to match it is still an excellent place to start an alt because it has good quest flow and gets you through the early levels at a quick, smooth pace. I like the Sarnak, too — story-wise, they are trying to find their place in the world, and have a very pragmatic attitude combined with a recognition of the importance of history. They’re aligned with Freeport, but I really don’t see why, as they are effectively neutral in almost every way that counts. Unfortunately, this means my Illusionist can’t live in their city of Gorowyn, which is a pity because I like it a lot, especially the housing and tradeskill area.

After leaving Gorowyn at level 21, Elithia finally took up her residence in Castleview Hamlet in Qeynos, and immediately started working on her armor quests. A helpful NPC in Qeynos gives you a whole set of armor, piece by piece, in exchange for you going out and killing stuff. Unfortunately, after getting the gloves and boots easily, Elithia’s next task took her deep into the sewers, which are annoyingly claustrophobic for a tall High Elf like her, and full of curves and little rooms which make combat uncomfortably close. That next piece of armor better be worth it!

To shake off the stench of the sewers, I decided to investigate the strange blue shard in Elithia’s inventory, which seems to have come from the Thundering Steppes. This is the start of the Splitpaw Saga adventure pack, which has a few nice solo challenges that scale to your level. The Splitpaw gnolls enjoy gladiatorial combat, which is why the first challenge Elithia undertook was to defeat their arena champions, a task which she completed without breaking a sweat or dropping below 90% health. (Poor things. Even the ones that weren’t terribly sleepy had trouble moving their feet to get close enough to hit her. Maybe next time they’ll remember to take their afternoon naps before trying to fight!) For this, Elithia received a mounted Dreadsnout head for her wall — still on fire, I might add — and a cute little mushroom pet that makes way too much noise when it walks around behind you.

Next, a sneaky gnoll wanted Elithia to sneak into a rival tribe’s hideout and destroy their supply crates. This was slightly more challenging, as the hideout was quite full of gnolls which insisted on fighting in groups instead of one at a time. Still, the appearance of two identical Elithias must have confused them, because they all died easily, leaving only their boss to be dealt with on the way out. Unfortunately, the boss left behind only a piece of plate armor, which soon found its way to a nearby gnollish pawnbroker.

The last test is the toughest: the Trial of Harclave. Commemorating a great hero, this is a solo trial in which you, infused with a spirit of vengeance and great power, must carve your way through a legion of heroic mobs just as Harclave himself did. Unfortunately, Elithia didn’t do too well here, primarily due to recklessness — while dealing with one group of six, two more groups added on, and even the Spirit of Harclave couldn’t save her from an untimely death.

As you can tell, I kind of like the Splitpaw adventure pack; while it doesn’t have a lot of solo content (it has some group stuff and raids too) the three quests you can do solo are fun, especially the Trial of Harclave which makes you feel really powerful. That, in fact, is where its difficulty comes from. It’s very tempting to get careless and risk an overpull; while you can easily kill one heroic group at a time with the Harclave buff up, adding a second or third group will quickly overwhelm it. I’ve failed it several times, and that’s always been the reason.

Next for Elithia: more armor quests, tradeskilling, and perhaps a Heritage quest or two. Meanwhile, my main, a level 51 brigand, explores the Sinking Sands on his flying carpet, while seeking to become a Vindicator of the Coin…

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.

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 few of my guildmates have started them on the Horde side, I thought I would post some links and comments here for them and anyone else who might be starting a cub of their own.

As always, I must put a disclaimer here and say that I’m not really a “hardcore” player, I don’t raid or PvP, so my knowledge of the endgame pretty much stops at high level 5-mans. If you want to look me up on the Armory and make fun of my gear, please note that I don’t care, and if you don’t see tanking gear it means I logged out in my cat form set, not that I suck even worse than I already admit.

One of the best references for druid theorycrafting and information is the Druid Wiki. Originally I had a bunch of stuff written here with tips for new druids, but then I realized that the Druid Wiki does it much better and in more detail. Start with their game mechanics page for more detail than you ever wanted to know about stats and mechanics of the druid. The druid facts page is also interesting, with a collection of random tidbits you might not find elsewhere.

Another absolutely indispensable reference, once you get near the end of your leveling career at least, is Emmerald’s feral druid gear lists. Here you will find lists of high-level and endgame gear for both bear and cat forms, ranked by effectiveness for tanking or DPS as appropriate, and sorted by equipment slot.

Finally, a couple of blogs. First I’d like to mention WoW Insider which is chock full of good information for all classes; the Shifting Perspectives feature is specifically for druids, and includes posts such as this one about talent specs for leveling. Another one I like is the Big Bear Butt Blogger who has been writing about druids for quite a while. For example, this post on multiple pull tanking is recommended reading for everyone who is a bear tank or groups with one. (And yes, I admit I’m not all that great at actually implementing what I’ve learned here. Oh well, it wouldn’t be a SBA run without a few wipes, now would it?)

See you in game, whether you’re behind my big bear butt, or I’m behind yours…