Raiding?

[ahzad]

Okay I'm relative new to the whole MMO thing. I've avoided WoW, and never had much of an interest in CRPGs, much less MMOs. For the past 30 years I've always been a table top, face to face, roleplayer, but I'm suffering some GM burnout and wanted to take a few months off and recharge my creative juices and got interested in DDO through ENWorld and ended up taking part in the beta.

So anyway I've really been enjoying it and have gotten most of my players turned onto DDO, set up a guild for us to take part in and signed up for a VIP account, and like me most of us have never done any MMOs.

My question is what is raiding and how does it differ from questing?

[mistahnice]

normal quests are limited to a max of 6 players, raids can have up to 12 people in them. they're significantly harder (but usually the raid itself is fairly short) than most quests and often require you to think out of the box or employ a specific strategy in order to take down the boss or complete your objectives. they always have a chance of dropping great loot that you aren't able to find anywhere else and binds to your character permanantly upon acquiring it.

[ahzad]

thanks for the quick response. i think i understand them better.

are there specific quests that are raids only, or is there a way to turn the normal quests into raids?

i guess what i'm asking is where do you find these raids and are they accessible to characters of a certain level.

[sirgog]

Okay I'm relative new to the whole MMO thing. I've avoided WoW, and never had much of an interest in CRPGs, much less MMOs. For the past 30 years I've always been a table top, face to face, roleplayer, but I'm suffering some GM burnout and wanted to take a few months off and recharge my creative juices and got interested in DDO through ENWorld and ended up taking part in the beta.

So anyway I've really been enjoying it and have gotten most of my players turned onto DDO, set up a guild for us to take part in and signed up for a VIP account, and like me most of us have never done any MMOs.

My question is what is raiding and how does it differ from questing?

The only absolute difference is that you have a group of 12 players, not 6. That's true of all raids.

Most raids (but not all) are more difficult to defeat than other quests of their level, and in particular are designed to mercilessly crush groups going in there for their first try at them. The is because they typically have more complex goals or fights than most 6-player quests.

For example, the raid "The Reaver's Fate", whilst generally considered easy, requires you to figure out how to remove a Wall of Force then disarm a bomb. A group of all first timers would almost certainly wipe on one of these.

[UnderwearModel]

A RAID is when you can BRING in twelve players or less.

Tempest Spine being the easiest RAID.

Velah the Dragon RAID

Demon Queen RAID

Titan RAID

Reaver's Fate RAID

Liche Black Abbott RAID.

The Hound.

The Vision of Destruction

The Shroud

[sirgog]

thanks for the quick response. i think i understand them better.

are there specific quests that are raids only, or is there a way to turn the normal quests into raids?

i guess what i'm asking is where do you find these raids and are they accessible to characters of a certain level.

Look in your quest log, it will tell you (next tothe quest level) whether a quest is a 6-person (called a 'quest), a solo-only (solo), a solo or 6-person (solo/group) or a raid.

Tempest Spine requires level 7 to enter (i recommend you run it at level 8-11 on normal, then 10-12 on hard and 11-13 on elite, but it can be done lower).

Vault of Night and Plane of Night are connected raids (usually called VON5 and VON6 respectively, you enter Plane of Night from the end of Vault of Night). Here I'd recommend a group of level 11-14 for normal, and a high level group (i.e. too high to get XP) for Elite. Each time you run this, you need to beat Tharask Arena, Prison of the Mind, Gateway to Khyber and Haywire's Foundary (some of those may not be correctly named). Also, if you beat Plane of Night, you cannot do Vault of Night or Plane of Night again for 66 hours of real world time. (If you fail Plane of Night, you may redo Vault of Night, this isn't a bad strategy for earning XP).

The latter raids are level 12 and higher, and usually are done in low or little XP groups that often have a level 20 in group.

[roakylamu]

Most of the raids have some pre-quests to do before you can do the raid, a couple of these require the pre-quests each time you want to do the raid, some examples:

Vault of Night - 6 quest chain, last 2 are raids, all 6 required each time you want to get a completion.

Zawabi's Revenge - must complete 3 of the quests in the desert (wizking, offering of blood and chains of flame)and then Against the Demon Queen to get access to the raid. ADQ must be repeated each time you want to do the raid, until recently all 4 pre-quests were required each time.

Reaver's Fate - requires 60 relics (20 of each) and completion of Gianthold Tor (with all 3 optional dragon kills) to get access to the raid.

The Shroud - requires at least 1 completion of each of the 5 vale of twilight quests and completion of the meridia crafting tutorial