DDO is easy, extreme challenge and balanced party needed

[r3dl4nce]

And yes, probably there are people who just like to zerk. .. But I dont

- Create your LFM
- Put "no zerg, balanced party" in the description
- ....
- Profit

[Satinavian]

Balanced party is the main point. I personally have never understood why some like to solo in mmo, I do not actually understand any game which is only for solo experience. Team based is the name of the game today. But yes, we are all different.

Balanced Party ? Main reason against it is difficulty to form it. There are already some quests that really benefit a lot of certain characters in a group and are rarely run without - and i have seen groups waiting for hours to fill and dissolve because of the one missing whatever. If it is a raid and the named loot is not even good for some of the needed classes, we have a problem.

Otherwise yes. Would be nice to go away from DPS only and have required roles : ideally 2 mellee-DPS, a trapmonkey, a CCer, a healer, a buffbot, a ranged DPS, an evasive sneaky guy.

Oh, more than 6 roles ? Yes, that is where both multiclassing and customization lies. It shoulkd not be possible to get optimal parties with 6 one-trick-ponies, there should be a huge incentive to build for different roles on the same toon, otherwise everyone can do the same and gear is the only difference.

Also no tank. Tanks are incredibly helpfull, but at the same time boring. How does it make the game more challanging, if there is a toon who can by only being in a party make the rest nearly invulnerable by taking all aggro ? If everyone can get damaged everytime, the game is a lot harder, that is why viable tankbuilds are detrimental to your desire to make the game mor hardcore or challenging.

Proof is in the Poison (level 4)
Xorian Cypher (level 8)
The Sharn Syndicate Chain (level 4)
The Phiarlan Carnival Chain (level 5)
The Pit (level 7)
Taming the Flames (level 7)
Chains of Flames (level 12)
Delerium (level 15)
Purge the Heretics (level 6)
The Chamber of Raiyum (level 12)
Invaders (level 12)
The Keeper's Sanctuary (level 9)
And the Dead Shall Rise (level 11)
The Crucible (level 14)
Rainbow in the Dark (level 16)

My list would have been different (what exactly is difficult in Sharn or heretics ?), but more or less this includes a lot of difficult quests. But all of them are a lot easier, when you know, what to do and therefor fail rarely.

Still things like Crubicle or Pit have a lot of challanging situations - which are challanging because they differ from the rest of the game. Moar DPS doesn't solve them. Balanced Parties do neither. Or tanks. Still they are a lot of fun.

Challange != tanks required
balanced party != tanks required

[Spoonwelder]

Balanced party is the main point. I personally have never understood why some like to solo in mmo, I do not actually understand any game which is only for solo experience. Team based is the name of the game today. But yes, we are all different.

No one is forcing you to solo - me I solo because I have a plan for what quests I am going to run in a session - if no one already has an LFM up I will just start and do my best. Often I am playing without voice so I will not put up an LFM - if I have voice though I will put up the LFM but it will say In Progress since i am not waiting for a group to fill for very long.

Quests are vastly easier on normal vs. Elite - even with a good party elite can kick your butt if you are missing a rogue or decent healing. Examples - Shan-to-Kor - yesterday on elite with a group of L4-6 Arti's - all but one died in the fire traps since no one had high enough search to get find the device boxes (I had 14 or 15 search and couldn't see them). A true rogue with decent gear may have been better. Example 2 - tried Ghosts of Perdition on Hard after the update buffing bosses - had a group of 2 Pal/1Monk/1Bard/1Sorc - no healer - and that was the difference - I was the bard and was trying to provide the healing but it just wasn't enough.

Play the higher difficulties untwinked and see how it goes. It is harder - though not impossible. Do you want it set to 50/50 chance of failure with out a balanced party and 80/20 with a balanced party? Or do you still want 100% success but only with a balanced party? What is your sweet spot?

[Templarion]

No no, do not understand me wrong.. I like DDO actually. I am not even HC wow player.

So does it mean now that I am not allowed to ask more challenging difficulty ? Does it mean that the game should only be difficult when you reach lvl 20 ?

It is not wrong to ask more.

I have been voting for more challenge since I started.

[Jaajoo]

Once upon a time the effect was permanent until removed... ( Curse was like that too )
Potions were handy to have around.
Crawling back to an inn with only a black screen and the map as help has been done by a lot of us in the begining.

Once upon a time the maximum level was 10.
At that time Endgame was Tempest Spine, Ruins of Threnal Chain and Vault of Night.
At that time having a +1 Vorpal was having one of th'e best weapon in game.
At that time having plain a +5 Armor was having one of hte best armor in game. ( Adam or Mith +5 armor were the best )
Now this kind of stuff is vendor trash or if you have low level characters twink gear.
I created a bard a few weeks ago... once she came out of the veteran ship she picked up in the bank
two timeblades, and a full abishai set ( among other things ).
So basically at LVL 5 she is better equiped than a LVL 10 character from 5/6 years ago.
That in itself makes all the harbour, all the marketplace, all the houses quests really easy to zerg through, as they are they haven't changed since the original release. ( a time when doing them with a +1 armor and a +1 weapon was the norm )

There's also a huge gap between LvL 10ish and LVL 14/15ish. You'll notice it when you reach it. By LVL 13 quest are really really really harder.

As somebody stated we used to run quests with level way above the party level ( VON3 with a bunch of LVL 5/6 was common at that time, Madstone with LVL 8/9 characters was also the norm. ) to squeeze more XP out of the quests. Now it's not interesting anymore.

This sounds like a rational reason why it all feels like a zerg now. I was not playing DDO when it came out, so hard to tell, but at least this sounds like it could be the reason. I would like this to be fixed + I do not like that DPS is more or less the only way to go.


Maybe actually the blindness forever is a bit too HC for me. That max 1h would make it equally well.


When I got in the game and I saw the first +5 item. I was thinking that this is something totally different than in PnP, or at least this is very high fantasy world in PnP terms. But acceptable.

So if the items are overpowered, and the economics in the game are so that all can just buy +5 item, and on top of that the level range for those items is low. This kind of thing is probably a big thing to change in any mmo. Economics are hard to keep in balance.

Maybe still least work would be to make elite difficulty to be that balanced party difficulty. Or create a new difficulty for it. This way it would not affect to the rest of the game.


Balanced party in DDO is DPS+traps+healer at the moment, and the play style is zerg. There are some agro management skills, so I think that someone in the dev team was actually planning to have tanks in the game.

Tanks are very effective to decrease zerg, because after that nobody attacks blindly anymore. It immediately organizes the party to work together.

If everyone likes DDO because it has the zerg -> Then probably there will be no tanks.

I vote for more tactical game play and tanks ! .. Why I also sent the first post.

[nivarch]

Tanks are very effective to decrease zerg, because after that nobody attacks blindly anymore. It immediately organizes the party to work together.

If everyone likes DDO because it has the zerg -> Then probably there will be no tanks.

I vote for more tactical game play and tanks ! .. Why I also sent the first post.

No tanks please. Tanks are boring and stupid.
I'm fine with tanks on bosses, but not on trash.

DDO is a fast paced game. Tanks would just make it slow paced.

There are other ways than tanks to impose to think before you run in. Epic has a way to force you to reduce the zerg : crazy high damage, if you leave the party, you die (well until you know how to zerg the quests, but it's harder).

I don't know why people insist on having tanks. Leave tanks in other games and let us dodge the hits.

(Oh and if they fix SB3, I'll make a tank, doesn't mean I think it's a nice addition to the game).

[Talon_Moonshadow]

I do not agree with you.

I suppose the game is not very challenging for some really twinked players. But they are rare in PUGs.

What I see, as a frequent PUGer, is that there are many, many heavily twinked, high DPS builds........who refuse to do any quest without a healer. Often have other "required" classes, or tactics or buffs....

Are the first in line to use any exploitish tactic they can find.

And are the first to drop group if things do not go smoothy.

And in many cases onl want to run the hardets quests in the easiest setting that wil get them their desired goal for that quest.

And for some reason, these same supermen do very poorly when things do not go as planned. If a healer dies, they are soon to follow.

They do not know how to adapt, and have no desire to learn or even try.

I am completely convinced that few people in this game actually desire a challenge.

What they desire is instant Completionist and Epic loot.

Granted...this is just my opinion, biased by dislike of a certain playstye.

But you tell me! What do you see in the LFMs?
Cause I see:

Know it!
Need Healer
Casual for loot
Casual for flag
No Sulu

That spells "quick and easy" to me.

[Jaajoo]

Jaajoo,
I'm curious, you say your highest character is level 11. You also say all content is easy on all difficulties so far. I'll assume you've done everything at level through 11 on elite.

This seems pretty impressive to me. My question is: are you running with vets such as your friend who started the game at inception or have you been entering dungeons with others who have never been there/no spoilers, etc.?

With this character I have been playing more or less only with my friends. I try to keep it so that this character will follow the same levels as my friends do have. Just that we can play easily together.

I played as any new casual player. Checking the places and getting familiar with the game.

My last one is lvl4 (or enough XP for lvl5). I play purely elite bravery streak with it, just started. This is the time when I noticed that artificer is so OP. They just massacre everything, there is nothing that can stop them. So it is good to just walk behind them. I am a healer and they rarely even need my help. I have never seen so easy elite Kobold Assault. They were all 3 just standing in one place at the gate and they were not just killing everyone, they were mutilating the kobolds. I think we were lvl3 or maybe someone was lvl4.

In that moment I decided that if the artificer is not nerfed the class balance is lost forever. Waiting for that nerf.

[r3dl4nce]

In that moment I decided that if the artificer is not nerfed the class balance is lost forever. Waiting for that nerf.

And you judge class balance at level 3?
Please, try to play ALL the game, not the same khorths/harbor quests....

[Viren1]

The real catch to this entire discussion is that, no matter how the devs set the quests up... Whether its difficulty or how balanced a party you need, We will always have a group of elite players who will find a way to break them and then that knowledge gets passed down the chain and before too long you have a large group of players capable of running the quest with ease.

If you want the game to be challenging, make it more challenging for yourself as others have said, If you find it so easy to play everything elite at level and flat out refuse to try and challenge yourself then perhaps this is simply not the game for you.

The big drawcard of DDO is its variety... Being forced to wait 2 hours to get the perfect party for running a single quest is not fun. Call me crazy but I would rather be questing then sleeping waiting for people to join a party.

[Kmnh]

I agree with what the OP said, the nerfs removed all the challenge from the game.

I doubt anyone would get out of the old epic chains of flame crying "too easy". Old as in "before the wizards PREs came out and the minion debuff made CC easy"

All the cool immunities disappeared. Remember when you couldn't use enchantments on some mobs?

I remember the first time I did Prey on the Hunter on elite. Keep displacement and waves of exhaustion going, energy drain + web the cleric, don't get hit by cometfall. Positioning, kiting, healing, all had to be done in a coordinated way, or you would wipe/burn lots of resources.

It was the coolest game I've ever played, a combat system a lot faster and more interesting than any other MMO had to offer, and it was killed in the name of casual players

The only reason I stick around is that I love playing with my guildies and all the crazy people on my server.

[Jaajoo]

Otherwise yes. Would be nice to go away from DPS only and have required roles : ideally 2 mellee-DPS, a trapmonkey, a CCer, a healer, a buffbot, a ranged DPS, an evasive sneaky guy.

Oh, more than 6 roles ? Yes, that is where both multiclassing and customization lies. It shoulkd not be possible to get optimal parties with 6 one-trick-ponies, there should be a huge incentive to build for different roles on the same toon, otherwise everyone can do the same and gear is the only difference.

Also no tank. Tanks are incredibly helpfull, but at the same time boring. How does it make the game more challanging, if there is a toon who can by only being in a party make the rest nearly invulnerable by taking all aggro ? If everyone can get damaged everytime, the game is a lot harder, that is why viable tankbuilds are detrimental to your desire to make the game mor hardcore or challenging.

Challange != tanks required
balanced party != tanks required

I think we share many ideas.

The tanks make the game boring because all the rest are invulnerable after that... I am not asking this, I hope that the developers would not fail the tank implementation this badly. (If there is ever going to be one) I do not know if you have been playing other mmo games, but you have to be extremely good tank to tank for DPS which is aoe or zerg. Probably it is impossible to do in many situation. So it does not make the rest of the group invulnerable, if it is implemented correctly.

If there were tanks, and so that you would actually need those -> It would make the challenge rate higher. If you do not have tank and you get beating -> You just die fast, and wipe probably. Like in wow, if the tank dies -> Often the whole group dies. If the healer dies -> Ofthen the whole group dies.

Balanced party.. I would be happy to see new innovations for balanced parties. I think DDO is offering traps as a "new innovation", but removing tanks. You need that trap monkey, but you do not need tank in this game. I think it would make the game better if tank builds would be useful. .. -> In the same way as you need trap monkey in elite quests, you would need damage taker, tank as well.

This would make board&sword agro tanks to be useful, we would see a lot more this kind of builds in the game. Well, you do not have to build your character purely for tanking, but it could be so that you still need that shield, and high AC. Some feats/enchantments/skills could boost this feature -> In the same way as traps do need skills, which you can boost with feats and enchantments. Makes sense ?

[Jaajoo]

The real catch to this entire discussion is that, no matter how the devs set the quests up... Whether its difficulty or how balanced a party you need, We will always have a group of elite players who will find a way to break them and then that knowledge gets passed down the chain and before too long you have a large group of players capable of running the quest with ease.

If you want the game to be challenging, make it more challenging for yourself as others have said, If you find it so easy to play everything elite at level and flat out refuse to try and challenge yourself then perhaps this is simply not the game for you.

The big drawcard of DDO is its variety... Being forced to wait 2 hours to get the perfect party for running a single quest is not fun. Call me crazy but I would rather be questing then sleeping waiting for people to join a party.

Well, could they make the quests so that pure DPS zerg is not enough ? Or so that 4x WF wizard with a level of rogue is not enough ?

[EvilI]

- Mob to hit so that high AC is needed -> Good/ok character build for tanking and shield should be needed.

This line makes the question the statements made in this post. Are you talking about the game at levels 16-20?

[Jaajoo]

I agree with what the OP said, the nerfs removed all the challenge from the game.

I doubt anyone would get out of the old epic chains of flame crying "too easy". Old as in "before the wizards PREs came out and the minion debuff made CC easy"

All the cool immunities disappeared. Remember when you couldn't use enchantments on some mobs?

I remember the first time I did Prey on the Hunter on elite. Keep displacement and waves of exhaustion going, energy drain + web the cleric, don't get hit by cometfall. Positioning, kiting, healing, all had to be done in a coordinated way, or you would wipe/burn lots of resources.

It was the coolest game I've ever played, a combat system a lot faster and more interesting than any other MMO had to offer, and it was killed in the name of casual players

The only reason I stick around is that I love playing with my guildies and all the crazy people on my server.

I was not here when this was real. It also sounds different than the current system. Which I would describe "Nuke it as hard as you can".

[vittordevittor]

Go play tibia and complain that the game is easy. I am not in the mood to fight a dragon for 2 hours, ty.

[Jaajoo]

This line makes the question the statements made in this post. Are you talking about the game at levels 16-20?

End game RAIDs should need pretty much maxed AC for the tanks. That is for sure.

I think the maxed tank build should not be mandatory for the quests generally.

[Karkotrunk]

My last one is lvl4 (or enough XP for lvl5). I play purely elite bravery streak with it, just started. This is the time when I noticed that artificer is so OP. They just massacre everything, there is nothing that can stop them. So it is good to just walk behind them. I am a healer and they rarely even need my help. I have never seen so easy elite Kobold Assault. They were all 3 just standing in one place at the gate and they were not just killing everyone, they were mutilating the kobolds. I think we were lvl3 or maybe someone was lvl4.

In that moment I decided that if the artificer is not nerfed the class balance is lost forever. Waiting for that nerf.

Jaajoo,

Just wait and see Sir. I can promise you that this will change at higher levels.

A long time ago, maybe two years ago. I built a range fighter, that used repeaters. He was the bee's knees up to about 10th level. Repeater damage just does not scale like other types of damage. Crossbows don't a stat that ties into their damage. All you have is the base damage die and the weapons enhancement.

I got that guy up to level 12 before he became irrelevant.

[Attropos]

I was not here when this was real. It also sounds different than the current system. Which I would describe "Nuke it as hard as you can".

There is still quite a bit of challenge in the game for a new player, especially at higher levels.

What you are experiencing is something known as "the vets syndrome". The artificers you saw? Probably had Holy Repeating Cbows of Reptilian Bane, along with elemental bolts. The people you run with? Stacks of haste pots/cure serious wounds pots. They may also have been TRs.

The amount of unbalancing gear available to vets (or hell, anyone with a level 20 at early levels is staggering. After 11, you start seeing the self sufficiency of melee classes go down. Of course, the best TR'd melees with stacks of SF pots/ heal scrolls will still be able to roflstomp dungeons without a healer, but it is only at level 12-13 that CSW pots stop being able to outheal damage output.

You will soon realize that the low levels make up only a small part of the game (a skilled vet will rush a first lifer to 11-12 in less than 5 or 6 hours). Try playing the game at higher levels before claiming it is too easy.

As a first life, if you say the game is too easy, try everything on elite, without people above the level of the quest. Still too easy? Try soloing, now that will put some hair on your chest

[elraido]

Should have played it when the game first came out. Brutal. Now it is a kind of watered down with the power creep that has come into play. That is a good and bad thing though. Means more casual players can come in and have fun with out being destroyed....bad part is, some quests that were hard to begin with are a cake walk.