Dungeon Diffuculty

[Mystic8Ball]

Someone told me its better to do casual and normal before doing other modes, and doing each seperate mode atleast once for extra exp and/or favor points. Is it true? also should I try to do every difficulty(Even epic?) before moving onto the next dungeon?

[Kralgnax]

Someone told me its better to do casual and normal before doing other modes, and doing each seperate mode atleast once for extra exp and/or favor points. Is it true? also should I try to do every difficulty(Even epic?) before moving onto the next dungeon?
Welcome to DDO!
You can't do epic untill you're level 20, and actually most of te content is not available in epic or solo.
The argument for doing every difficulty is that you get a bonus 25% experience the first time you do a dungeon on each difficulty level. People grinding exp out of a dungeon will often do n/n/n/h/e, or c/n/n/h/e but you can do other schemes if you like.
It doesn't matter when you do the runs, but it can be operationally more efficient to knock the dungeon out on all its difficulty levels - at least for lower level dungeons - before you move on. As the dungeons level up, the hard and elite become much much more challenging than normal.

[Arwinja]

alot of people will run the big xp quests in a nnnhe format to milk as much xp as possible out of it. some even run normal up to as many as 6 times before runnning it on harder difficulties.

when leveling a toon i tend to run dungeons a level higher than it is since you dont take an xp penalty for being one lvl higher, i also go back and run it on higher difficulties after leveling since hard is 1 level higher of a quest and elite is 2.

favor works a bit different. if you run a quest on elite you automattically gain max favor for that quest.

hope this helps.

[African-Grey]

Someone told me its better to do casual and normal before doing other modes, and doing each seperate mode atleast once for extra exp and/or favor points.
Just to clarify how favor works: the only factor in how much favor you have from a quest is the highest difficulty you've run it on; favor rewards from the same quest do not stack. So, using a quest that gives 4 favor on normal, 8 on hard, and 12 on elite: It doesn't matter if you run it once on normal, hard and elite, or if you've only done it on elite and not normal or hard, you will have 12 favor from that quest. And, no, running it again on elite won't bring you up to 24. :)

[EKKM]

There are so many quests at lower levels that is not necessary to do all of them N/H/E. What most do is do the quests they like or can find groups for. Later they will come back at high level to get the favour they missed.

At higher levels there are fewer quests so running N/H/E is required.

[Nebless]

Someone told me its better to do casual and normal before doing other modes, and doing each seperate mode atleast once for extra exp and/or favor points. Is it true? also should I try to do every difficulty(Even epic?) before moving onto the next dungeon?

From a straight xp / use of time view - yea probably. From a game enjoyment view - sounds like you'd just be setting yourself up for burnout.

First you have to ask yourself why you're playing and what you want to get out of it. If it's to level cap in the quickest amount of time, so you can end raid then go for it.

If it's to enjoy the game, dungeons, atmosphere then you'd lose that by sitting there and doing each and every dungeon 4(max) times in a row. Nothing says you can't go through all of the (we'll say Kothos) missions on normal. Play on the mainland for awhile, then decided to take a break and go back to Kothos for Hard / elite settings.

[Zenako]

Few more bits of info to expand on what others have said.

Quests have challenge settings: Casual, Normal, Hard, Elite (and sometimes Epic)

Favor award for completing a quest runs like this: Casual (1/2 Base Favor), Normal (base favor), Hard (2X base Favor), Elite (3X base Favor), Epic (funky color on quest list)

The Quest challenge level runs off of the base it is set for at Normal.

So a level 4 Quest on Normal, will be considered Level 5 on Hard, Level 6 On Elite, Level 3 on Casual (Casual is -1 level settings). See the chart below..


Quest Effctve Monster and
Setting Favor Level Traps Level
Casual 1/2 X Y-1 Z-1
Normal X Y Z
Hard 2X Y+1 Z+2
Elite 3X Y+2 Z+5
Epic - 20 infinite


Notice how the toughness of the monsters and encounters scales up a lot faster than the mere level of the dungeon.

Now on top of that, there is a game mechanic called Dungeon Scaling which will affect the challenge the monsters present to you that runs independant of the above settings, and is based solely on the size of your party.

On Casual, when running without a full party, monsters get significantly easier to kill
On Normal, when running without a full party, monsters get a lot easier to kill
On Hard, when running without a full party, monsters get slightly easier to kill
On Elite, when running without a full party, monsters hardly change at all
On EPIC, its all EPIC

All quests have a bonus award (%) granted to you on your EXP for the first time you run that quest AT THAT CHALLENGE setting. The Base Amount of EXP also changes slightly as you increase the challenge setting (and decreases from the Base when you run Casual). On Elite the first time bonus is 50%, but you often have to really earn it if you are running quests at your level.

Z

[AZgreentea]

This should also help you understand the myriad of ways to earn XP and the way it changes in a quest:

http://ddowiki.com/page/Experience_points

[KualaBangoDango]

There is an important reason for doing lower difficulties before doing higher, besides learning the quest on an easier setting of course, and that is track-ability.

Your quest compendium page ("P" button) only keeps track of the highest difficulty you've done each quest on, so if you're wanting to re-run quests for the bonus XP for each difficulty it's best to start on the lowest difficulty. That way you'll always know where you left off on each quest and can go back and finish up. On the other hand if you start on the highest setting, your quest compendium will only show that highest setting and you may not remember which lower settings you've done, especially if it's a quest you stop working on for a while and come back later.

Edit: Of course you can track your quests yourself, if you want to get around that limitation, by writing the info down yourself on a piece of paper or excel document, etc.

[Mystic8Ball]

Thanks for all the help and advice, I think I understand now.