Iconic Chars, without the TR just another thing to ignore..

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Originally Posted by Tirbaalis

I think its easy really to see. If you are starting to play, you like the game and you just bought a shiny new VIP subscription (or got it as a gift). So now you have access to everything in the game ...

But you have no clue how to build a character for lvl 15 and up. You have no gear you can switch over, and likely you have no friends in higher lvl guild who can help you out So what now? Play the harbor and marketplace until you get bored?

Instead you can now dip in some TP, get yourself a character-build that you would have trouble making without the experience (Paladin is great - but its hard to get working on a first life!) and you can have fun at more than just low lvl. This hooks you up, makes you understand the game, and stick with it (either going on to better characters, or just loving the nice looking gear on this one).

Now, I myself would probably not buy this, because I remember the first veteran characters I made in classes I did not know (druid, Art, or even my first 4th lvl Bard!). Basically I had no clue how to play them. But it does allow people to get into higher lvl content to see what the game offers there, so it should help keep everyone playing.

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Seems like a poor idea, a new player jumping straight to high levels quests will only get brutally murdered by everything. The quests have a learning curve, if you skip the process you're not gonna do very well.

....I can already see the lfm: No Iconics!, in raids or even other quests. This feature seems to offer very little to long term players and looks like a money trap for new ones.

Also:

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Originally Posted by Tirbaalis

Paladin is great

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Sorry, you lost all cred there. :D

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Originally Posted by NiborRis

That would be fine - if it wasn't coming with the expansion pack and very likely to be included in the pre-order bundles that include the desirable unique pre-order goodies, whatever those happen to be.

I'm not sure I like the business plan of making premium content that only newer players will have an interest in, either. The "content to encourage new players to play" should be the free part, that's the freemium model, right?

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Personally I agree, but this isnt how MMO companies see it. The 'free" in f2p means free insane grind, while surrounded by people who pay to mitigate the time sync regularly.

Most MMOs dont have a huge chance of failure when building a firs time character. Part of the convenience factor that is desired when playing a new game is not having to build a few gimps before learning how to play and then dealing with respecs or deletion + start over. File in "colossal waste of time" bin.

We saw the first iteration of this with the first Xp stones. These were introduced before the first expansion to get people up to level 16 ASAP, regardless of level of optimizing knowledge, so that even players who played DDO for a week or two could jump into the new content. The FR lore is far more popular than Eberron lore, and to entice new players into the game, they created a way for them to jump right into the FR world, without having to level. Unlike the Xp stones, this has minimal appeal to established players.

Personally, I like the IDEA of Iconics, but would like to see them put to real use. Bladeforged Paladin is nice, but don't forget the Assassins and Artificers!

DON'T block TRing, if you have to...make them limited...to only select classes and Bladeforged Race. But do not limit them to first time and trash by stopping their end-game before it starts.

I did enjoy playing the class...with the special equipment and with some stuff switched out from the treasure room. But...since I didn't have access to the store or to good loot (LIKE GREATSWORDS) that is L25....I don't have a decent grasp on what the devs wanted to test...

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Originally Posted by Chai

Its nothing more than a convenience button to attract players from other MMOs who do not understand the mechanics of building a D&D based toon. Its not meant to be in addition to the power one can already have in this game, but a different path entirely.

Veteran players should just keep going with their old toons.

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The correct way to do that would be to fix the "paths" system to actually be useful. Maybe make a forum competition for designing those builds into something useful or something, and then let them pick those.

If they can't design paths to be useful, how are they going to design the iconic characters to be useful?

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Originally Posted by Ovrad-Kab

Seems like a poor idea, a new player jumping straight to high levels quests will only get brutally murdered by everything. The quests have a learning curve, if you skip the process you're not gonna do very well.

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Lower level quests are often more complicated and difficult than higher level ones. Getting cursed, blinded and set on fire by a pack of kobolds every 2 seconds or being constantly slowed by trogs all the while having all your equipment destroyed by a bazillion oozes while you run past all the secret doors you can't see looking for the corpse of some guy in one of the hundreds of alcoves.... yeah. And Book Binder Rescue on elite, LMAO or the traps in Reposession. Then there are such glorious quests as The Pit and Proof is in the Poison.

No. At 15 they'll be doing elite gianthold, which are some of the simplest and easist quests in the game with the one exception.

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Originally Posted by NiborRis

That would be fine - if it wasn't coming with the expansion pack and very likely to be included in the pre-order bundles that include the desirable unique pre-order goodies, whatever those happen to be.

I'm not sure I like the business plan of making premium content that only newer players will have an interest in, either. The "content to encourage new players to play" should be the free part, that's the freemium model, right?

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This post presupposes that only veteran players buy expansions which I don't think is the case. Expansions are often the marketing/news blurb that introduces or reminds players of a game they haven't tried yet or didn't know about. Nearly every MMO I've played I started with an expansion version of the game. (I'm not an early adopter of any games but especially not MMO's as they tend to be very bad for many months if not often years).

As for Iconic characters, clearly IMO they're supposed to be pre-min/maxed characters that have a little extra "exclusive" flavor/ability that wont be available to regular characters. The reason for this is obvious... Many casual players don't have much fun playing DDO, it's easy to suck, it's easy to die a lot, the game not only requires more "twitch" eye hand keyboard and mouse FPS style control, and a million and one hotbar clickies than most MMO's... It also is easy to make a character that can't hit anything with a weapon, can't land anything with a save, and runs out of SP before it kills very much with nuking. If that's not enough you can actually fail to do any of that decently well, while at the same time managing to not have enough hit points to survive an ogre's cleave, or a hard trap.

It also seems clear to me that Turbine for whatever reason is trying to skip players past the mid game (with Iconic characters and the curious XP stone level range both supporting this supposition). Maybe this is a really dumb reaction to metrics that say they lose the most new players between 8 and 16th level, and another metric that says players with 15th + level characters tend to buy the most TP.

I say dumb because if that's why they're doing this then someone's interpreting data in a stupid way. and making a decision (now two decisions) THAT COMPOUND THE PROBLEM.

You see, statistically speaking of course the level ranges where the most new players quit is going to be in that range. It's super easy and fast to get to 6-7th level, and the grouping system is filled with new player friendly LFM's and Vet players who KNOW they're going to be running with some fresh faces.

OTOH, around 7th or 8th level the game starts getting harder, and LFM's start getting more "Know it" your character choices which were nearly meaningless from 1st to 6th level rapidly start to show their worth. You start missing stuff around 8th or 9th level with a low STR score. You start missing saves, and dieing instantly in Elite traps and you start seeing hostile LFM's like "Farming part 4 Know it don't suck".

These changes might be a misguided reaction to that, trying to get newer players "over the hump" where they see the most losses. and into the "sweet spot" where they sell the most TP's.

Of course the obvious problem with all this is that those same players using an XP stone are suddenly dumped into content that's even harder, and they probably still leave only now they're p*ssed because they spent $50 on the game to find out their character was a dead end after all.

So Iconic characters. Of course the problem with those will be that the Dev's seem to have a fairly poor understanding of how DDO is actually played, versus how they wish or ideally view it to be played. So these characters will be poorly min/maxed and wont end up being the premade uber they're shooting for. Case in point no reconstruct SP line for the previewed IC.

All they're achieving with this is making a dead spot in the middle of the LFM range even worse (I notice it every time I get a character around 13th level) possibly making players discouraged and more likely to leave the game.

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Originally Posted by Marthesis_

The correct way to do that would be to fix the "paths" system to actually be useful. Maybe make a forum competition for designing those builds into something useful or something, and then let them pick those.

If they can't design paths to be useful, how are they going to design the iconic characters to be useful?

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Yeah, I agree - this is basically another path, already leveled most of the way.

Dev's stated that the Iconics won't be TR'able..

So these look like a decent way for someone completely new to make a really quick character that can play with their friends without having to worry about getting gear, learning how to make a build, or doing any research.

Other than that, I don't see the use, but then again, these aren't made with people like me in mind who have been playing for 2 years. These are the "just download the game and play NOW!!" quickie setups.

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Originally Posted by Ironclans_evil_twin

This post presupposes that only veteran players buy expansions which I don't think is the case. Expansions are often the marketing/news blurb that introduces or reminds players of a game they haven't tried yet or didn't know about. Nearly every MMO I've played I started with an expansion version of the game. (I'm not an early adopter of any games but especially not MMO's as they tend to be very bad for many months if not often years).

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Not really - I'm just saying that many veterans will be interested in the unique items that tend to come with a preorder bundle - such as the XP tomes that came around last time. And it seems really likely that veterans will be forced into buying Iconics to get those unique items. And it also seems likely that many veterans will be unhappy buying those Iconics and will have no use for them at all.

The fact that the bundle will be useful for newer players is fine but doesn't really fix the situation for the veteran fans. Making the Iconics more attractive to veterans does.

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Originally Posted by danotmano1998

Dev's stated that the Iconics won't be TR'able..

So these look like a decent way for someone completely new to make a really quick character that can play with their friends without having to worry about getting gear, learning how to make a build, or doing any research.

Other than that, I don't see the use, but then again, these aren't made with people like me in mind who have been playing for 2 years. These are the "just download the game and play NOW!!" quickie setups.

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mmo are about building a character, not insta action without thinking.
every and each try to play mmo without investing time in your char is a sure way to fail.
i didnt have time to check out the stuff you get but knowing turbine i am sure its ****.
now combine this with quests like the madness chain, acid wit and co.

if you want insta action join another game, there are dozens. dota and co

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Originally Posted by adfsdasdaf

Lower level quests are often more complicated and difficult than higher level ones. Getting cursed, blinded and set on fire by a pack of kobolds every 2 seconds or being constantly slowed by trogs all the while having all your equipment destroyed by a bazillion oozes while you run past all the secret doors you can't see looking for the corpse of some guy in one of the hundreds of alcoves.... yeah. And Book Binder Rescue on elite, LMAO or the traps in Reposession. Then there are such glorious quests as The Pit and Proof is in the Poison.

No. At 15 they'll be doing elite gianthold, which are some of the simplest and easist quests in the game with the one exception.

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oh yeah sure, acid wit and co will be so easy for the bunches of newbs <<
it will be the same scenes again as with the free stones, lfm cluttered with "need help in xxx" "why does no one join?!§" etc..

that it'd be hard to summarize them. I'll cite the top reason for me:
a 'completionist' attitude towards the game. I'm not talking about having a completionist feat somewhere in your stable of characters, I'm talking about those of us that like to try everything that the game has to offer.

That means running Titan at least once, or taking the Hamstring feat at least once, etc. I'd like to TR to and/or from iconic characters simply because I think it'd be a fun experience. I don't see any valid reasons for why we shouldn't be able to, or why there couldn't be added restrictions.

I wouldn't mind being forced to keep 1 paladin level at creation, nor loss of the creation forge gear, or even capped stat flexibility like drow.

I just want to be able to experience the full flavor of this class/race without having to invest a ton of time into rolling a completely fresh character that has no long term trajectory and no history.

I thought the devs said these things would be TR-able. I thought it they were part of an epic TR system that earned the player 2 more build points.

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Originally Posted by TuskCouncil

that it'd be hard to summarize them. I'll cite the top reason for me:
a 'completionist' attitude towards the game. I'm not talking about having a completionist feat somewhere in your stable of characters, I'm talking about those of us that like to try everything that the game has to offer.

That means running Titan at least once, or taking the Hamstring feat at least once, etc. I'd like to TR to and/or from iconic characters simply because I think it'd be a fun experience. I don't see any valid reasons for why we shouldn't be able to, or why there couldn't be added restrictions.

I wouldn't mind being forced to keep 1 paladin level at creation, nor loss of the creation forge gear, or even capped stat flexibility like drow.

I just want to be able to experience the full flavor of this class/race without having to invest a ton of time into rolling a completely fresh character that has no long term trajectory and no history.

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I agree with this. There is no real reason why we can't TR into them other than the devs say no. I'd even be fine with having say 5 paladin levels as a requirement. You get some extra power in the iconic, but you are more restricted in your build choices. It really is a shame that I'll probably never play one seriously as the art department did some amazing work on the look of the class.

There is one positive in my mind I guess. As they can't ever TR, you are done once you hit cap and get your destinies. It's not an option to increase your power so you're not "losing" anything by not doing it. My current main has a few lives left to completionist and I honestly don't even really want it other than it's a goal to achieve. Iconics don't have the goal ahead of them so are a lot less work to "complete". To some people that might be very positive and make jumping into the game or just a new toon a lot easier to handle. They don't have that multi life grind ahead of them to turn them off. If the caster iconic has some boosts that a multi life caster might have, then it's good for new players to get an "almost there" caster without months of grind on past lives. With epic GH a lot of endgame loot is now BtCoE so you can get much of the gear you need in advance from other toons or from trades. All that would be left is to pick up a few pieces of necessary raid gear.

The one huge downside is that by the looks of it iconics won't have the same power as multi TR'ed characters (rightfully so of course) so when you do finally "finish" the character you are going to be behind others and have no real way to advance yourself to that point. A character that can't TR may just be left on the shelf until a new level cap is introduced as it has nothing to do in the meantime.

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Originally Posted by Singular

I thought the devs said these things would be TR-able. I thought it they were part of an epic TR system that earned the player 2 more build points.

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Originally Posted by SqueakofDoom

[*]Bladeforged Iconics are not supposed to be able to reincarnate

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^^

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Originally Posted by Daemoneyes

mmo are about building a character, not insta action without thinking.
every and each try to play mmo without investing time in your char is a sure way to fail.
i didnt have time to check out the stuff you get but knowing turbine i am sure its ****.
now combine this with quests like the madness chain, acid wit and co.

if you want insta action join another game, there are dozens. dota and co

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I think Turbine is looking at this from a different perspective.
They just want to make something flashy, cool, sellable, and make it so that people who aren't interested in having an uber character with 47 past lives and perfect gear can just download, spend some $$, and play right NOW.
Now that the game is going to have 28 levels, a level 15 starter build is hardly end game. It's just past 1/2 way!

The problem you touched on is that Dungeons and Dragons is more complicated than the typical MMO. And we D&D'ers like it that way. The best part of DDO for a lot of folks is building your character, but if you are starting from scratch, that can be a really daunting task. Go ahead and try to explain how to build a character properly to anyone who has never played DDO. Try to explain how items stack, what does, what doesn't, how feats work, pre-requisites, enhancement points, skills, etc..

What they did was make it so that anyone who just walks in off the street has a decent shot of making something not completely unusable. Or at least, that is what their stated goal is. Whether it is "good" or not is a matter of debate.

Personally, I'd love it if they just sold the new iconics as sub-races (New skins!) for us folk who are tired of the same old looking characters. I'd buy the cosmetic aspect of them, and leave the flavor and build for those who want it.

Building a character and TRing and all would be nice if it didn't take more time than learning a language.

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Originally Posted by Davellfus

honestly this is just another **** waste of dev time, that could be giving us a new race or class, or more epic feats and so on... (or who knows, fixing the **** bugs that still exists in the epic destinies!)

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OR even fixing some of the other STILL broken things.

OR fixing all of my bookmarks (which is A LOT) that link to the old forums and not getting "404 Not Found" and then having to sift through a ton of pages to find it and re-bookmark it.

And when logging into the new forums, I had to choose my beta name and not my main name which has all my previous posts and correct join date.

Not happy...

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Originally Posted by Daemoneyes

mmo are about building a character, not insta action without thinking.
every and each try to play mmo without investing time in your char is a sure way to fail.
i didnt have time to check out the stuff you get but knowing turbine i am sure its ****.
now combine this with quests like the madness chain, acid wit and co.

if you want insta action join another game, there are dozens. dota and co

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I think you're misunderstanding comes from you thinking DDO is an MMO. It's not. It's an instanced solo game with co-op/social options, and this is why DDO is a niche game and why it doesn't have to compete with other MMOs. The ability to solo your way to cap/to be self-sufficient and not need a healer. To be able to just grab the first five and go. All of this stuff comes with a price, and that price is that new players need to have an easy entry into this solo arena. Unfortunately, this isn't the current case. New players join thinking this is an MMO and build toons as though it is and casual players don't usually know how to build/gear their toons. This causes them to get frustrated and leave the game. Devs are now focusing on fixing this, and that is why we're getting things like Iconic Heroes.

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Originally Posted by adfsdasdaf

Lower level quests are often more complicated and difficult than higher level ones. Getting cursed, blinded and set on fire by a pack of kobolds every 2 seconds or being constantly slowed by trogs all the while having all your equipment destroyed by a bazillion oozes while you run past all the secret doors you can't see looking for the corpse of some guy in one of the hundreds of alcoves.... yeah. And Book Binder Rescue on elite, LMAO or the traps in Reposession. Then there are such glorious quests as The Pit and Proof is in the Poison.

No. At 15 they'll be doing elite gianthold, which are some of the simplest and easist quests in the game with the one exception.

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that is exactly the reason why i like tring so much... the lower lvl quests can be so much fun...

anyways, they will still get brutaly murdered... necropolis IV is the same lvl as GH, do you think a new player will know how hard necropolis can be? heh they will just see: mmm both lvl 14, going to get both.

there is a lot of stuff lower lvls teach you that is pretty important imo (like how to deal with **** beholders)

also about building a decent toon... if they had a updated manual that ppl could at least read to understand the mechanics... it would not take more than one or two days to create simple but efficient characters...
or at least update the class paths after updates, also add some suggestions on which type of gear you should be using at each level for that certain path.
And promote normal play a bit too, so first timers don't feel the need to run everything on elite. Pretty sure 90% of ddo quests can be done on normal with a charisma based barbarian halfling dual wielding maces and a healer hire...
bravery streak is great for vets, but heck it causes quite a lot of problems to pugs, maybe a change on this mechanic would be good, let's be honest... why first time on elite? if i can complete on my first time, i will complete on my second, third, ... the concept is pretty nice, but it screws up new players looking for groups, and most of them don't want to lead and start their own lfm. (heck, i know a lot of vets that hate leading groups yet)


I just can't see how allowing new ppl to by pass half the game is going to help them sell more...
this entire iconic character is a failed concept imo, just add a general bladeforged feat and call it a day.