Ideas to make DDO compete with AoC

[Placenta]

A stupid pen and paper session is listed at the bottom.

Yeah new classes are cool but when are they going to make the mid level quests worth doing? They are tough for mid level toons and offer hardly any good rewards.(Especially xp) It would not take much for them to take existing quests and just bump up their hardness for higher level toons as well. A level above elite. Name it Super elite or name it Four bagger. (The term comes from the amount of full bags of heal wands the cleric has to carry for it.) What would help them as well is if you could scale a character down to group with people that have new toons. An example would be take a level 6 quest and allow a level 14 person to join without a power level message. Some of us have maxed out all characters on all character slots. Just drop the level 14 character to the minimum quest level. If it would be too hard to scale it upon entering the quest let them (at no cost or cooldown) go to their class trainer and scale up or down X amount of levels. If you do not, then when you implement the new classes you end up with a party make up of 6 monks running through WW-STK drinking health pots through a http://www.zymetrical.com/product.as...FQWmIgodqUcdFA


Make some of the quests worth doing besides something you only enter when you want to get 1750 favor. You know the ones? It is the quest that someone puts up in guild chat asking where it is. Then they ask if anyone has it open on elite because it is too painful or boring to run three times straight to get your elite favor. Plus offers no decent loot from the random loot generator nor any good named items.

Make high end content more often. Making new mid level quests are cool but how long do you keep your toon at mid level? Long enough to run every mid level quest in the game as you slowly progress to 14? The xp and rewards for the new mid level quests are not all that. Instead I notice while leveling new and mid level toons that you can still find or make a STK group before you can get people together for any of the new mid level content. Nope instead you go back to the other mid level quests after you are capped. Then you knock it out when you need the favor. Then it seems more like a hassle than an adventure.

Bring back the ability to sacrifice your damage/to hit for a high ac. As it stands now in the game, the strategy in most all groups I see is to make tanks that do a crazy amount of damage while maintaining a crazy amount of hitpoints. Then to make matters worse they put cooldown timers on heal scrolls and wands. Then took away devotion items stacking for wands. Also made the mobs be able to dispell every single buff off you with one dispell while your clerics greater dispell has no chance in doing the same thing. The mobs were suppose to scale down their to hit when our ac was trashed for batman builds and pure warrior builds. Instead you can get just as beat up in the desert/black anvil mines type quests as you do in most the new gianthold quests.
When people go for all intimidate/ac/saves while taking a massive loss to their to hit/damage. Then they are doing it for strategy purposes. Crowd control in this game has been getting the nerf bat left and right. Casters have seen it too with solid fogs and web timers reduced. SP has been added but whats the use when you burn through most of it on the first couple of encounters because your tanks can't take a hit and have 300+hp. With full wand and scroll enhancements you have to use two heal scrolls to full bar em. When tanks had the ability to tank and work into a group dynamic the game was just as challenging plus it added an element of strategy to the game. Instead of having to kill them before they kill me as quick as possible while the cleric is using a wand/scroll with a full bar of mana to save for the (OMG we are gonna wipe for sure!)
encounters.

Change mob AI

Fix intimidate to where it can work it's way up a hate scale with the mobs. As it stands now if someone intimidates a mob that is ticked at a caster they only have control of the mob for a few seconds before it heads right back for the caster. Either that or in their erratic pathing around the intimidator they get struck by a arrow or stray sword swipe that was not intended for them. If it even did no more than 1 point of damage to the mob the mob will go straight for whoever hit it after the intimidate wears off.

Who is crazy enough to try to intimidate and turtle up now? To get a high enough ac you have to be a dwarf or lucky enough to get two chattering rings. It is crazy difficult to get over a 60 ac. When I could achieve a 64 ac there were still mobs that cut through it like it was nothing. BAM comes to mind. Guess what? Bam still does it only your tanks now have an even lower ac while the mobs kept their to hit.

When I played pen and paper D&D I didn't shout out the the DM,"I am going to throw down a super hot firewall and run and jump around it till either I am dead from stray hits or the mobs that are running in circles chasing me are dead from exhaustion."

The pen and paper game

A pen and paper game running like the majority of the fights in this quest would get old and would force the person sitting across from you playing his cleric commit seppuku. The guy next to you at the table playing his caster got bored. That is because he used half of his mana for buffing and the rest of it for hastes. So now he is swallowing a hand full of D6s because he thought it would be a fun way to roll stats for a new character he is making tomorrow. You are just glad that you didn't have to pug a bum off the street into the group. Last time you did that he vomited on your kitchen floor and fell asleep inside your refrigerator. The rogue is at home because who needs him when you can just run through the traps while you have your tank pick the locks. The dm is not even rolling his dice to see if the mob hits you.

He is just saying it is after looking at your character sheet to see what your AC is. Your barbarian is awake at the table rolling D20s while maniacally yelling out how he is going to try to hit every mob with his first swing and then proceed to take all incoming damage till the cleric(who hasn't honorably died from seppekku yet) is selling his kidneys to pay for heal scrolls/wands. Your bard is across the table wondering if the dm would allow his bard to get a tracheotomy. The rogue is at home wondering why they let the bard come.

The rogue then starts wondering if the dm would allow him to give the bard a tracheotomy. Your paladin is wondering if beating down a razor cat with a blunt item is like beating on a mountain lion with a paper towel tube(IRL). After swallowing his last D6 the caster asks the cleric to toss him all of the dvs he has so he can blow it all on one spell cast for the boss mob. He is thinking why not? He unleashes one maximized/empowered/hightened/(Place any additional mana consuming feat here)scorching ray knowing that the mob will chase him to hell to kill him a second time. The paladin is trying to provide an aura for the scattered group while comforting himself with the thought that even though his group is about to wipe, at least the casters have a little higher concentration check while standing next to him.

Your ranger yells out that he is calling out his pet in real life. You do not turn your head to see what he means because you know he is drunk and you will not be fooled into looking at it again. Last week he told you that a foul miasma shrouds your mom. Then goes into depth on how he would have to have a real life disease immunity item to date your mom. Explaining to the doctor why you thought your D4 collection should be coterminous with your friends brain that night really put a damper on the evening. Is the paladin carving his character sheet info into your mothers coffee table? Can't believe he calls his pocketknife retribution. Doesn't matter. His to hit is horrible and all he does is called shots to the mobs crotch. God he argued with the dm for two hours claiming that a gelatinous cube has reproductive organs so he should be able to make that hit. Your DM has taken his DM shield that he uses to hide his rolls and turned it into a ridged paper airplane that is bombing the fantasy figurines he has on the table with D20s. Your wondering how cool it would be to have a D20 crafted out of Gary Gygax's kidney stone by now. The barbarians ADHD meds ran out about the same time the cleric's platinum supply ran out.

He is going home because he can't believe the cleric let him die. He leaves telling everyone that the party would have been fine if you all would get some 30 percent striding boots in conjunction 20 stacks of haste potions to keep up and keep his warforged healed. As soon as he leaves the developers from Turbine enter your parents house through the basement window. (Cause they are sneaky) They proceed to remove the sword from the cleric's adomen.
Laughing to one another they say. "Silly cleric. Don't you know this game was just meant for vorpals?" Then they proceed to chop off the clerics head while yelling. "New patch!". You overhear one of the developers asking as he crawls back out the basement window. Where is their friend who plays the rogue live? We need to tell him about the patch.

[Gol]

Oh, my eyes! Burning! Abort! Abort!

[Gimpster]

Who is crazy enough to try to intimidate and turtle up now? To get a high enough ac you have to be a dwarf or lucky enough to get two chattering rings. It is crazy difficult to get over a 60 ac.

Warning, two chattering rings gives you no more AC than just one.

[Nalfein]

Dodge AC bonus stacks the last time I checked.

[Placenta]

Ahhh right you are. Thanks. Assuming I had two I would have known that. I tend to learn the hard way. Still though one chattering ring plus one protect five item, chaos guard, delving suit.......blah blah blah = getting hit more than you should for the amount of time it takes you to get all the high lvl armor pieces. Imo

Thanks for the correction

[Placenta]

It does? I thought it did. I do not know. Someone with two dodge items shout out about it.

[Gol]

It does? I thought it did. I do not know. Someone with two dodge items shout out about it.

They have in the past. Dodge bonuses stack as long as it's not from the exact same item. In this case, 2 Chattering Rings would not stack.

[Ziggy]

dusts off notebook.
http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php...36#post1019436

The dodge bonuses for multiple chattering rings are being treated as coming from the same source so they do not stack.

[Coldwind]

An other idea that I periodically tossed in is to scale the quest,(and LOOT) to the party lvl, ie.. A lvl 14 party walks into Kobold Assault and it turns into Storm Giant Assault, having L14 mobs, and again L14 LOOT!!!

[binnsr]

An other idea that I periodically tossed in is to scale the quest,(and LOOT) to the party lvl, ie.. A lvl 14 party walks into Kobold Assault and it turns into Storm Giant Assault, having L14 mobs, and again L14 LOOT!!!

They would be able to much more easily do this if it turned into kobold champion assault -- putting in different models (and associated stats) is a far cry from scaling the current mobs stats.

That said, I had the same idea a while ago, and it popped into my head anew halfway through the OP.