The Totally NEW Team Corwin Thread

Haven't had time to play that char since then, so !!

Friday is not here yet!

Are you sure? This is YOU we're talking about knowing what day of the week it is!!

(Did my volunteer work yesterday, that is always on Wednesday and all the ladies were there with me.........)

Yes I am sure I know Friday has not come yet.....

I do my volunteer work today, so I won't see any of you till Friday; the day after, which helps me remember!!

I'll be working tomorrow. So I may or may not be late, depending on how fast I can run out of fittings, and how bad traffic is.

Last night, and into this morning, was an interesting session. We found a lovely way to spend 45 minutes in DDO; letting Earth Elementals kill things through "impenetrable" barriers.

Corwin and I kept summoning elementals, which then slowly chewed away four Blackbone Skeletal Knights in Caverns of Korromar on elite. Then, lacking his melee backup, the Beholder fell without me casting more than a couple cure wounds spells. I spent more sp on Searing Light than healing, actually.

Of course, the rest of that dungeon was a bit rough, we had about 14 deaths total, and basically only didn't wipe because Peter has a twinked out character using stuff he pulled with his higher level, and thus has an AC high enough to be meaningful. He also spends a ton of money on ressurection and healing items in the DDO store, something the rest of us don't normally have the funds to do.

It was without a doubt the oddest game tactic I have been part of ever. I know that has to be an over-site on the developers side.

Now the way I saw this was slightly different then my kind com padre. Having fought our way to this point, with all of us racking up at least 1 death, except maybe our rogue, the thought of tackling this last battle was draining my brain.

Starting this battle was to be triggered by the group. The defeat we felt in the air was evident…..everyone stood staring into this pit……no one offering any words of morale and convidence….no one even talking much at first.

Then as we gathered our nerves and settled into discussing some plan of attack we saw it. The summoned elements started to attack from the top of the pit. Reaching through the earth itself to get to our enemies. We laughed at their futile actions. Silly AI creatures…..burning up their time in vain.

But as we stood, still not ready to die one more time we saw it…..the health bar of one of those creatures took a small hit. Not much…..barely measurable at first. Then it moved again. They were being hurt. We laughed at the thought….still planning out our own assault …..and waiting for the damage to stop coming. But it did not stop.

So, tired and feeling VERY reluctant to enter that pit of death with a Beholder who had me for lunch several times before, we waited….and waited……and waited….

45 min later the last minion fell. The rest was a quick blur of spells and blades with the Beholder falling so fast even his AI cried out in disbelief. :lol:

All just part of my simple strategy!! There's a reason it's called Team CORWIN you know!!!!

We called the move "the genius of Corwin".

Something weird has started to happen as well. Instead of the usual quest success with 1-2 deaths (Corwin and Jo) it has changed to quest success with 1-2 deaths (Peter and Azraelck). I wonder why this is happening and I have to admit I don't like the new trend. We're so used to Corwin dying in our quests.

I think part of the changes in death is a combination of better play on both Jo and Corwin, Jo getting improved evasion. and me changing from Cleric to Paladin and vice versa for you.

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That's probably true. I usually manage to stay alive with my paladins, but we've played challenging quests on elite lately where the quest level is higher than our average player level. We've faced flesh renderers and beholders in several of the quests and those a REALLY nasty for a guy who gets aggro. The flesh renderers gave me about 50 hp per second damage even when I used my tower shield and bumped the AC to about 40. Since I'm supposed to kill these monsters then it's hard to both hit lay on hands and strike them. The paladin I play in guild play has currently level 11.

I think that the main reason we had this change is because in difficult quests my paladin is very dependent upon getting constant heals from your level 10 cleric so he can focus on smiting the monsters. But since your cleric got early aggro and died then my paladin didn't get the help he needed to kill the monsters. This will change a lot when your cleric gets level 11. Then you get the spells heal and blade barrier. This means you can cast a blade barrier before the difficult battles and get behind it before you cast heals on the melee characters. This means monsters who attack you will have to get past the blade barrier twice (if you withdraw a bit so they get to move past the circle 2 places). Blade barrier helps the cleric a lot and the entire party can use it to lure the monsters into i. Combined with a fire wall from the wizard you can take out really tough monsters that way. So I guess we need to be patient for your cleric to reach level 11 I guess.

At least it's nice to see Corwin and Jo not dying so much anymore. That should make the cleric job a bit easier since raise dead will be needed more rarely. When Corwin's wizard and sorcerer get toughness I think he will do even better. Jo's rogue is finally working on elite quests since she has upped the spot, search and disarm traps skills so much so she can actually deal with almost any trap.

The entire RPG Watch group benefits from the loot my level 16 cleric and paladin find. So it's not only my level 11 cleric and paladin that will perform better. Loot wise I think you all have better loot than you otherwise would have.

I think there are 2 main reasons my toons do a bit better than most of you.

1. I've purchased the 32pt build instead of the usual 28pt build. That means my toons have 4 more build points that most of you have.

2. I've purchased the +2 tome of superior power for all my toons. That means my toons have all +2 to all stats compared to you. That means 12 or more extra build points just there. I say more because getting +2 to e. g. starting wisdom of 18 would cost 8 build points to increase instead of just 2. So all my toons have at least 16 build points more than most of you. When you have 28 points and mine have 42+ points it will make a big difference, especially at lower levels.

A third reason my toons can stand up quite well is because I've studied the DDO forums for great builds and stick to them. That means all my toons have a build plan that will make their efficiency getting better and better at higher levels. It's so easy to botch your build by selecting the wrong feats, skills and enhancements. Many of them look nice, but are crap. This can only be found out by trial and error. Fortunately for me the forum experts have already done that and made up character builds based upon feats and enhancements that work. E. g. the heal skill is totally useless in DDO, but in regular D&D most clerics and paladins would need it. Diplomacy is almost useless too, but in regular D&D paladins would definitely get that. The reason is that there is almost no role-playing in DDO. So being a good diplomat would rarely help you from avoiding fights. Most quests are made so you have to kill certain monsters and then it won't help talking nicely to them.

The last reason my toons do well is because I buy healing and mana potions from the DDO store and that means my cleric never runs out of mana and I can always heal with potions if seriously hurt. The healing potions saved my paladin from dying in the Caverns of Corromar when all the rest of you died. I just ran away drinking potions before I re-engaged the monsters before repeating the process again. Drinking 5-6 potions was needed to finish off all monsters.

What do most of these advantages have in common? It's MONEY. If you can afford to buy Turbine points regularly then you can make life easier in DDO. This is probably deliberately designed like this by Turbine. Some quests are so hard so you have to spend quite a bit of real money to make your toons powerful enough to beat them. That generals money for Turbine. I have a feeling that this will become even more apparent at higher levels. The result of that is that we can only be able to do the quests on normal (maybe even hard). It means we can't reach the highest favor levels and get the best loot, but that's maybe not so important after all.

Of course Turbine want you to spend real money, but most of us only have a limited amount to spend on the game. Right now, I mainly buy adventure packs and a few mana potions.

1 - All my Characters are 32 point builds. I GR'd Rachail into a 32 point build, and rerolled Aerii (from Suisaidh the Cleric) for 32 point build, while the others were made from the start as 32 pointers.

2 - All my active characters have eaten +2 tomes. Aerii and Rachail only lack the INT tomes, but neither uses skills very much. So you, at best, have 2 extra points to those two characters, and only one for being past level 8 against my Bard and Sorcerer.

3 - All my characters have a general build plan. Part of Aerii's issue is that we're running a lot of undead-heavy quests, and back when I made her Turn Undead was completely and utterly useless. So shes not specced out for Turning. Radiant Servant wasn't a stretch from my original plan, as I'd already taken Empower Healing. The only change was swapping Toughness for Augment Summoning, and that was simply to test the new feat out. I have mostly enough resources to swap back, which I'll do eventually.

4 - I'd like to point out that your Paladin isn't the only one I have to keep up. Tom's barbarian takes just as much aggro, and he lacks any self healing whatsoever. Corwin grabs aggro with every Fireball or Firewall, and if Jo is able to get sneak attack damage on a critter, she can often out damage either Paladin or Barbarian, and grab aggro that way. Once I get Blade Barrier, I'll be drawing aggro as well.

This is ignoring the random aggro of the Beholders, or some monsters ignoring hate tanks and going after whoever they like. Or enemy Arcanes appearing behind us, and nailing my butt with a pair of 100+ damage lightning bolts. Even with -30 from Resistance, that's still about 140+ damage done in about a second, which will kill pretty much any non-melee at out level, even with Toughness and a false life item.

Basically, the difference lies in time played and money invested, as well as play style. I'm working on mastering sp conservation with my Cleric, which means I won't need sp pots. I've never seen anywhere that the game at any point requires a store purchase, other than one Korthos quest that was added in U5. Most veteran Clerics and casters scoff at using store-bought pots, with more than a few believing that they should be removed entirely.

Part of my shift to sp conservation is shifting to potions, wands, and scrolls to deal with things like stat and level draining. Even Raise Dead makes little sense to memorize, as a scroll can handle the issue just fine. Pushing for wards like Freedom of Movement helps mitigate damage, and so effect-removing spells will be slowly phased out as I get the cash in game to stockpile needed scrolls/wands.

This is why I ask for any Restoration/Lesser Restoration, etc scrolls. Though I'll likely start buying the wands instead, as a 50 charge wand will last me a few sessions at least, under normal circumstances. Still, anything of that nature should be saved, for any of the four Clerics and one FvS in the guild.

As far as real money goes, I have all currently existing classes, races, and adventure packs in DDO. As said I've ate +2 stat tomes on everyone already as well. That leaves very little worth buying on the store. The only thing I like to have is the 20% XP pots (the loot gems seem to not work, but I have a ton of them so it doesn't matter). I just wish VotM stacked with them. +25% would be very nice.

Those 20% pots are probably the only reason my characters are keeping up with your two you run with the guild, actually. I have little time to play, and once school starts will have even less time.

Turbine has deliberately made it impossible to buy mana potions from vendors within the game. That means the main source for such potions is the DDO store. You can get a few mana potions from loot, but not enough to keep up when a group is in trouble.

I usually use my mana potions when the group is in real trouble. When we have an almost party wipe then the wipe would be complete unless I use the potions to raise people from the dead and heal them up again. The alternative would be to respawn and that means we lose a lot of real time and even XP.

Since we do some quests on elite then the risk of party wipe is quite big. But we had to do it to get the extra favor and for left behind characters to get decent XP.

I wouldn't mind removing the potions from the DDO store, but then they should make them available with in game vendors instead. I don't think it will happen because if you look at the best seller list at the DDO store you see stuff like mana and healing potions. It's a big income source for Turbine.

You lose mana so fast in some quests it's not even fun. When we're in a really tough fight I can use up all my mana on heals in just that fight. The problem is that the radiant servant heal effects heal too slowly to be effective during the battle. It's nice to have to patch people up after the fight. Flesh renderers do something like 50 hp per second and then you need to spam the real heal spell in order to keep people alive. At higher levels I can use mass heals to save mana, but it requires people are close to each other. That's not always the situation.

Arcane casters burn a lot of mana too, especially in elite quests. So I think we know what we're heading into by selecting elite quest. At least we get decent XP, favor and often better loot doing that.

MMO's are made to be money machines for the company making the games. You need to hook up people on playing so they spend a bit of money here and there without looking at the total sum they're using.

My vacation is now over so I won't have time to play as much either. I will mostly play during the weekends. Other games will be released during the fall that will catch my interest. I just bought StarCraft 2 and will get Civ 5 in September. Crysis 2 will be released this fall too. Next year we will see the Starwars MMO The Old Republic etc. So I think this Summer has been special when it comes to DDO playing. I guess getting new levels will happen much more rarely now. We still have our Friday night and will sometimes play a bit Saturday night too. So I'm not afraid of DDO consuming all my leisure time, although I see why some people get addicted by WoW and other games and forget about real life. MMO's are made so you have to invest a lot of time to get anywhere.

Yeah, I've been playing the beta for World of Tanks, Team Fortress 2, and about to dig out and install the old Call of Duty: UO and see if it'll work in Win7. None are time intensive, but still, limited time means limited time.

I also have EUO installed again, after a long break from that one, but it's changed so much I don't know where to begin anymore. Civ 5 is on my to-get list, and I'm debating Bad Company 2.

Play time is a factor for me to some extent, but money is also limited. I plan on buying some of the new games that will be coming out, and my budget is limited so I have to pick and chose where I want to spend it. My poor characters will have to remain more real life. They are just commoners who have average equipment, no extra education, and only the food they can scrounge up to keep them alive. :lol:

If some of us get Civilization 5 then we could play Civ 5 online.

I think it's good to not spend all cash upon DDO because it's nice to have new impulses from new games from time to time. DDO can become a bit repetetitive.

I do have a new understanding of the addiction of MMO's though. I've played nothing but DDO since April. Never thought I'd even play an MMO at all. I've had Eschalon 2 collecting dust for a few weeks now, and that's just not right.

I've dumped a fair amount of cash into the game, but for the hours spent over 4 months, I suppose it's not too bad. I've got most of the low and mid-level adventure packs now, so perhaps I'll start looking into some of the tomes.

@Az- Phuury isn't really built to conserve HP. He's running light armor. His game is blitzkrieg. With great cleave, he can cope with getting mobbed, but he's going to lose a lot of HP if he can't knock the critters down pretty quickly. I probably ought to start bringing my fighter to the group more often. Shadohe can't deal the DPS that Phuury can, but she won't take as much damage in the process which means she won't be as much of a draw on the party's resources. (not being snarky, it's an honest appraisal)