Ask and it shall be delivered!
My first real go at group work in Dungeons and Dragons Online the other night, and something of an eye opener, and exercise in frustration to some extent. I'd quite quickly found myself fascinated with the idea of traps, secret doors and so on, so rerolled as a Rogue, to better get to grips with this unusual and somewhat unique feature. Also, the dwarf's running animations are pretty awful, somewhere between 'constipated ape in a hurry' and 'seized up robot'. Turns out I needn't have worried too much - halfling running looks just as bad, and they're also impossibly thin across the shoulders, lending a somewhat anorexic feel to them. Possibly I don't have my screen set to the right aspect ratio. Not important though, and off we go!
I romped through the first couple of solo adventures, as before, and got out into the Harbor District again - the first main lobby zone. A quick run around to familiarise myself with the place somewhat, and on goes the LFG flag.
DDO's LFG tools are very well done actually. Groups can be found, or applied for on a Quest-by-Quest basis, which is a nice feature, along with the more usual Search-by-Level, Search-by-Class, and so on. Class is important here, because perhaps more than most other MMO I've seen, the party's class composition is quite important. There are a number of key jobs to be covered, and although you can muddle through just about without some of them, it's a hard uphill struggle, if this trip was anything to go by. I'm getting ahead of myself though.
Although there were quite a few groups listed as seeking, and I didn't much care what the quest was, none of them were looking for folks my level; one. Not to worry, I'll get on with one of these solo adventures in the meantime. Early reviews of DDO were quite critical over the lack of solo content. It's hard to say if that's necessarily improved a lot now, but there are certainly a decent number of dungeon instances aimed specifically at solo players now, along with adventures that can be attempted in either Solo or Normal difficulty mode. This difficulty is selectable when you enter the instance, and also includes Hard and Elite modes too, available as unlocks when you've successfully completed the dungeon on the previous setting.
So the next hour or so saw me vanquish an infestation of spiders in a family crypt, while only accidentally destroying a few sarcophagi in the process. Unacceptable collateral damage as a quest fail condition...novel! I ransacked a Miller's warehouse and fought my way through his mechanical guard dogs to find some taxes he was hiding, and managed to eliminate a band of warehouse looters without accidentally setting off the barrels of gunpower left carelessly lying about the place. Entertaining stuff, but not really why I was there.
Luckily, while in the middle of trying to protect an NPC priest from scorpion assault while he consecrated an altar, a group invite tell pops up.
A quick jog across the Harbour later, including a very steep flight of stairs that I miss every time, we assemble outside the Waterworks. It's an odd group consisting mostly of Fighters, Rangers, a Barbarian, a Rogue (me), and a Bard, who was the only person in the group with any kind of magical powers. Bit of a sinking feeling, ("Don't we need a Cleric?", "Naaah"), but I'm hardly in any position to argue, as I'm new, and also two levels lower than most of the rest of the team. When in Rome, and all that. We grab a quest from the guardsman standing outside the doorway, which to be honest, I was in too much of a rush to read properly. I think it was to do with missing guardsmen, and Something Unpleasant In The Sewers. And in we went. On Hard Mode. On an Adventure aimed at Level 3 characters.
First we had to get to the actual instance. Turns out that the Waterworks are a kind of explorable linking zone of sorts. I didn't see anyone else other than our party in there, so I couldn't tell if this was an instance itself or not. It has monsters, and you do actually get xp for killing them. It's done in an odd way though. When you first see them, you're simultaneously given an impromptu pop up quest to defeat the 'encounter', and it's from this that you get the xp - not the actual kill itself. A strange way of doing things - perhaps a kludge to allow basic mob-whacking into their framework of only giving xp for quest completion.
Not that it mattered to me, mind you, as lagging behind, not knowing the way and just desperately trying to keep up, all I saw were empty tunnels and corpses, scoured clean by the melee types way ahead of me. Part of me is relieved, as I'm a L1 DPS paper-tank in a L3 Hard Mode zone, and part of me is feeling a bit left out. I suspect I was only recruited as a kind of semi-autonomous lockpick on legs really, but that's okay...it's why I picked Rogue.
We gathered at a drainage hatch inside the greater Waterworks zone and all dived into the actual target instance - a sub-sewer infested with kobolds. I think there may have been captive guards in there too. We gathered inside, and it's only then that I start to learn just how crucially important Level actually is in DDO.
We move up to the first archway in the main tunnel. 'trap here', one of the Fighters says. Clearly, he's done this particular dungeon before. I nod professionally. 'Ohh yes. Trap! Definitely! You can tell by the...err...way the moss is growing on the north side of the trunk, you see...and these markings...yep. trap. trappity-trappity-trap-trap...'
I hurriedly consult with my 'Spot' check detection ability, a function of one of my Rogue skills, which is meant to warn me of impending Giant Rolling Balls, Pressure Plates and the like. It stares back at me in the vaults of my mind with a kind of blank stare and spread-hands shrug, mouthing 'What trap?' I try the 'Search for Anything Suspicious' hotkey a few times anyway. It finds nothing at all out of the ordinary, reporting back 'Perfectly safe here, guv!' with a cheerful smile.
I step forward into the archway, and am hit from the sides by two high pressure hoses, only filled with green acid stuff, and die instantly, not ten feet from the start of the instance.
A little embarrassing, but the group are fairly cool about it. One of them picks up my Spirit Stone thing and they just casually stroll through the streaming jets of green gunk and move on, taking largely superficial burns as they do. I now get to follow the party as a ghost, in a kind of Observer Mode, until they reach the next Resurrection Shrine. A quite informative trip, with none of the tedious difficulties of Being Mortal; combat damage, further traps, injury or death.
We get there in the end, and I come back to life. The scene repeats itself in varying shades of hurt, but nothing quite as drastic or fatal happens. But throughout the rest of the adventure, I didn't spot a single trap in time, or even find the boxes to turn them off once that had gone off and become plainly visible, and the only secret doors I saw were the ones that everyone else saw first, most likely automatically as plot points. Combat was little better, and in the end I just resorted to hanging at the back, firing the odd arrow and hoping against hope to actually make my 'To Hit' dice roll.
Mind you...I wasn't the only problem with the group and the whole thing was conducted at the kind of breakneck speed one would expect in WoW, EQ2, etc, rather than the slower more methodical approach that a game of D&D, and I suspect by implication, DDO must need. Quite a bit of solo gung-ho warrioring going on and the poor Bard, who for some bizarre reason, was our primary, and only, healer was having real troubles keeping up. I suspect it was only a massive, and cost-prohibitively expensive, stock of healing potions in the meleefolk's inventories, funded by a more successful main character, that kept us all going at all.
One particularly cunning scripted kobold ambush caught us by surprise. Well, me anyway - perhaps the others had just forgotten about it since the last time they'd been through. They had shamans and all sorts - giving it all that with Hold Person, Fear, an other novel and interesting way to completely lose control of one's character. I think the idea is that some of the party make their saving throws, and can carry the day.
Combat is quite hectic, and the controls are unfamiliar enough for me to have troubles with it all. One thing that previous offline single-player D&D-based games all have, which DDO desperately needs, but can't ever have, is a pause button. Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights were often only playable in parts because you could halt the more hectic action as needed, review what's going on, issue fresh orders to everyone, and then start it going again. Obviously, you can't 'pause' an MMO, but the lack of any kind of 'turn-based' ordering in favour of a strange kind of free-fire pseudo-FPS mechanic is clearly going to take a bit of getting used to, and probably a great deal of experimentation in the Key Bindings window. Mind you, on the plus side, free-fire FPS-style Archery is a lot of fun, particularly from on high ledges, vs Melee monsters that can't reach you!
The ambush was all a bit too hectic as it turned out, and we wiped. One of the other newer folk decided he'd had enough at that point and pulled a technically excellent 'sry gtg :(', and full-point sudden linkdeath, but I wasn't too worried about it all. It's all interesting, and the remaining group members were very understanding about my impotence, and didn't seem to mind effectively taking me on a guided tour with free loot and xp.
One quick regroup later, we continued, and staying out of the way myself, we (or rather, they) did much better, and eventually completed whatever it was that we'd been sent in there to do - kill a Kobold Chieftain, I think. They were polite, kind, good-natured people and I got chatting with one of them after, about the game and it's people in a broader sense, and learnt a bit. I got more than enough xp to level, along with a huge pile of cash that should see me fine for the next four or five levels, and a big bunch of gems and magical items. Not sure I've really earned all that, mind you, and there isn't an awful lot I actually need to buy at this level.
Levels... DDO only has 20 of them in total, each divided into four 'ranks', and nowhere has the gulf between level three and level one been so staggeringly huge. In something like WoW, level three comes mostly before you've finished reading the 'Use the WASD' keys to move!' pop up tool tips, and throughout, jumping on a monster marked out as 'Yellow' - maybe two or three levels above you - is not only manageable, but often routine. Perhaps the Ranks are a more accurate breakdown. I'd have been...Level, er, two, vs a, hmm, level twelve (Elite) dungeon? Trouble is, you only get one 'talent-like' Action Point to spend at each rank mark in your progress, and the majority of your numbers, only go up at levels proper.
All this means that you really do need to go to where you're supposed to be, and with people who are also supposed to be there. Clearly in the above adventure, I was way out of my depth. This is especially noticeable when you're the group's Rogue, and the only reliable method you have on hand for spotting hidden dangers, is the 'Miner's Canary' method, illustrated above!
Another thing that quickly became apparent - you really do need to take your time with it all. Charging into the place as if it were the Deadmines, or Blackburrow, is a fast recipe for disaster, particularly if this is your first time in the place. DDO makes extensive use of all sorts of techniques that take a bit of time to work through; traps, scripted events, hidden doors, ambush from behind, all that, and anyway, much of the work that's gone into these interesting and largely unique dungeon romps, does seem to bear closer examination, if only to let the 'DM' finish speaking his sentence before dashing through and triggering the next one! Then again - if you've done this dungeon enough times before, to know where everything is, and have heard all the story before, why wouldn't you want to hurry along with it?
It's strange, but in some ways, the game feels like it's at war with itself - torn between a patient methodical and rich storytelling experience on the one hand, and the demands, limitations and expectations of fast-paced instance crawling MMO gameplay on the other. It's hard to say how much of this is the game itself, and how much of it is just that we, the players, are now so used to something different to what DDO is trying to be - a return to an older style of gaming, in new context.
Anyway, interesting stuff, and lessons learned. Plenty more goes before the trial runs out, and hopefully, those will be more in my current ballpark...