Unlocking Everything for (Mostly) Free

[Sympl]

Updated on Monday April 18th - just for kicks and reflecting the current price structure.

I keep hearing people gripe, or at least state carelessly that unlocking everything in the game for free is an unfortunately terrible grind. So I got curious.

I am not advocating doing this for everyone. Heck, personally I run VIP and I know plenty of people running Premium Accounts and dropping some money for point bundles here and there. That's the thing I love about DDO's business model - options. Something to fit you personally. But for the sake of this 'guide'/mathematical exercise, we're talking minimum financial expenditures.

Assumptions


All quests are run ONLY at one CR (Challenge Rating) below Character Level always.
A brand spanking new player (like I was years ago) will eventually run a character or two of each class just to figgure out what in the heck they are capable of so that they know what to expect from other party members. This ultimately means running quite a few toons. That's 9 classes instantly available from launch (11 total eventually), not counting multiclass builds. If you figgure 2 toons per class, that's already 18 toons.
We will never reroll. This is highly unlikely for a new player, but hey, it makes the example easier to follow. Any rerolling (assuming you hit the first 100 favor point on each toon at least) just means extra turbine points anyways - still not a bad thing and something that will put you ahead of the curve as listed here.
For ease of display, all first characters on each server (for the purposes of this 'guide') will be human, the second characters on each server will be Drow, the third characters will be Drow and the fourth characters will all be Dwarven Rangers. Arbitrarilly, mostly. Humans for no apparent reason, drow once they get unlocked, and dwarven rangers because I like them and couldn't bear to build one under 32-pts. :)
This 'guide' does not consider any sales. All purchases are made at full price.

Addendum: I also realize there are other ways to compute Favor Gain. One way that is always mentioned to me is by Figuring Elite (or Max) Favor for every newly acquired pack. I have chosen to do otherwise as I feel an Elite plow-through of what is presumed to be newly acquired content is laughable.

Here's where the 'Mostly' comes into play in 'Mostly Free'. Premium is hands down required if you plan on playing this game with anything past a cursory look. The perks you get for becoming Premium are unlockable/unpurchaseable within the context of the game itself (unlike everything else). See www.ddo.com/vip (http://www.ddo.com/vip) for a table comparing F2P/Premium/VIP.

Earning 'free' Turbine Points (TP) in game is tied to favor. A generic ratio of 25 TP per every 100 Favor. There are also first (and only) time TP awards at certain 'Favor Milestones' for the first time you reach them on any single server. They happen at Favor amounts 5, 25, 50, 500, 1k, 2k, and 3k, for a TP gain of 50, 25, 25, 50, 100, 100, and 100 respectively.

There are currently 7 public servers.

All that being said:

TP GAIN/LOSS BALANCE

Starting with no toons and the minimum purchase of
a 600 point bundle: 600
Create 1 28-pt Character on each server and complete
all CR1 content: +350 950
Complete all CR2 content: +350 1300
Complete all F2P CR3 content: +175 1475
Buy Catacombs (250); STK (250); and Sharn (350): -850 625
Complete all CR3 content acquired: +175 800
Buy Tangleroot (550): -550 250
Complete all CR3 content: ---- 250
Complete all CR4 content (less Three Barrel Cove): +175 425
Complete all available CR5 content
(less Three Barrel Cove/Delera's/Necro1): +700 1125
Buy Three Barrel Cove (650): -650 475
-----Drow becomes available-----
Create a Drow Character on each server and complete
CR1-CR5 (less Delera's/Necro1/Carnival): +875 1350
Buy Delera's (850) and Carnival (450): -1300 50
Create 2nd Drow Characters on each server and complete
all CR1-5 content (less Necro1) with ALL characters: +875 925
Buy Sorrowdusk (450) and Devil Assault (350): -800 125
Run all characters through CR6-7
(less Necro1/Sentinals) content: +2100 2225
Pick up Shared Bank as soon as possible in the
middle of above step: -1495 730
Pick Up Sentinals (450): -450 280
Run all CR8 content (less Threnal/VON/Necro2) on
all characters: +1750 2030
Buy Therenal (550), and VON (750) and Red Fens (450): -1750 280
Run all characters through remaining CR8
content and CR9 content (less Necro1&2): +1575 1855
-----Vet Status becomes available-----
Buy Restless Isles (550), and Demon Sands (850): -1400 455
Run all characters through available CR10
content (less Necro 1&2): +1050 1505
Buy Full Necro Bundle (1495): -1495 10
Run 1st Drow characters through CR12: +1750 1760
-----32 point builds become available-----
Buy extended Bank Slots 1 (995): -995 765
Create 32-pt Dwarven Rangers on each Server and
Run CR1-12 content: +3850 4615
Buy Warforged (795) and Monk (995): -1790 2825
Buy Halfblood Bundle(1995): -1995 830
Run Second Drows through CR12 content: +1050 1880
Buy Gianthold (950): -950 930
Buy Attack on Stormreach (550): -550 380
Run Drows and Dwarves through CR13-15 content: +3150 3530
-----Favored Souls become available-----
Buy Vale (850), Reaver's (350), The Path of
Inspiration (450), Shavarath (650), The
Dreaming Dark (450): -2750 780

You now own the game to date. With 780 Turbine points left over (Not counting what you'll pull from running the last 5 packs you just bought). You ran your first characters up to CR10 content and ran everyone else through CR15 content. You used a total of 28 toons. As far as account wide options, you lack only the second, third and fourth shared bank slots (at 995 points a pop) because I didn't feel the need to continue this exercise further and you have individually unlocked Drow, Vet Status, 32-point builds, and Favored Souls on each server. Congratulations. Now go work on TRing some toons and see if you can't get that Completionist Feat under your belt....or whatever else you think might be fun!

Is this an unfortunately terrible grind? Some may say yes, other may say no. I just let the numbers speak for themselves.

[wax_on_wax_off]

Hi, i like what you've done here.
I'm doing something along these lines but I have my own approach to it.
What I feel is important when you first start playing is to buy level appropriate content that has a high return in favour for the TP that you spend.
I used http://ddowiki.com/page/Adventure_Packs as a reference.
To this end my first purchases were Catacombs, Necropolis 1 and Sorrowdusk. All content that has under a 4:1 Turbine Point spend to favour return. This simply means that you will have to run that content less times to make it earn back what you spent on it. As an example, you would have to run to run The Sharn Syndicate more than twice as many times just to get the TP back that you spent on, possibly giving you the opportunity to cut the number of toons that you use down from the 28 that you currently need.
Using this strategy I now own the above as well as Necropolis 2 (not my best choice), Vale of Twilight and Gianthold. I chose the last 2 because they give me the opportunity to comfortably level a character all the way to 20 when I choose.
So far I have a 12 sorcerer, 8 drow palidan, 7 drow rogue on Kyber, 8 cleric on Argonnessen, 6 wizard/1 rogue on Orien, 14 ranger/1 rogue/1 fighter on Sarlona, 5 barbarian on Thelanis and a few toons on other servers who have earned either 50 or 100 favour but are probably broken and will be deleted.
My next store purchases (in order) will be Demon Sands, the monk class, Necropolis 3 and Reavers Reach. I feel confident now to divert some of my TP into the monk class because I am close to unlocking 32 point builds and because I have managed to level up a main on Sarlona and want to TR her into a monk splash build I'm working on. I'm confident that doing this will not drastically affect my adventure pack unlocking because of the content that I already own.
That's the best bit, I can now unlock 32 point builds with only 6 adventure packs, I'm sure with the order of your above choices that it wouldn't be the same in number of packs or total TP spent and I can level a character to 20.
In my experience it is quite easy to level up a character from level 1-12 without any packs or special gear so if someone suggests you buy a pack because of great items or great experience then ignore them. Levels 13-20 the experience and items that you get from quests becomes more important and Vale of Twilight and Gianthold are the only two reasonable choices.

[JollySwagMan]

+1 Rep, linking this thread when people ask about TP grinding.

[Sympl]

Made a major edit because I got bored. This bump is totally self inflicted. Just felt that after my hours of number crunching and word processing...well here it is at the top of the lists for one hot minute. :) Enjoy!

[Bolo_Grubb]

+1 for the info