How Goes Orien?

[SemiraLynn]

So after spending quite a bit of time away from DDO (working, trying not to play games, and then trying out other games) I've come to the conclusion that all games near-present and future are bad and will continue to be bad. Although it is important to make money, virtually all game developers now have little to no standards or quality control. So I've returned to DDO. If I'm going to be plagued by bugs, I might as well pick a game with the best character customization, a lot of replayability and the best combat.

How are pugs doing? I hope the server population hasn't dropped too much since I have to rely on pugs for anything I can't do myself. Crossing my fingers lfms don't take hours to fill.

It seems I have a lot of work to do. Characters to drag to 25. A TR to drag back to 20. Others that I really should TR. Hirelings to hire and then get killed. And raid loot from raids that hopefully still get ran from time to time. Have any good raids completely fallen into oblivion?

[M0NKEYB0Y]

As of late the common raids:

ECitW Shat runs about 10 a day it seems.
EVoN6 run a ton
EDQ run a ton
ELoB not so much
EMA rare
ToD not as often as in the past but still see them.
Shroud about the same I think
Abott possibly a bit more common

[dynahawk]

Welcome back,

LFM panel seems to be strong except for "End game" stuff. Not nearly as many raids being run since MotU. The other epic quests seem to be solo'ed / guild / Channel runs. Shrouds are still run, and ToD a bit too.

Edit: I play mostly in the evening in eastern time zone.

[nix_vali]

There are still pug lfm raids going.
I wont give my opinion on pugs just because everyone has a different point of view about that, but ddo is so easy now is kinda hard to mess up.

TR,ing got abit faster with all the xp bonuses.

Also...

Lag is still here as always it will never go away... we still have plenty of bugs... old and new.

Welcome back!

[zwiebelring]

Strong low lvl. to mid lvl. LFM activity, less high lvl. pug. Mostly you'll see House of rusted baldes xp. farming LFMs. Epic elite almost to none in pugs.

In any way, LFMs you open will fill up. Many lurkers around? Try for yourself .

[ferrite]

Lol like the whole 'trying not to play the games' thing. Life is short, do what you like I say!

Though welcome back to Orien, and DDO. In a nutshell,

-Pugs are slightly harder to fill.
-Server population is halved (but is halved across all servers anyway, so no great loss here)
-Post-epic content introduced. Still quite a few bugs with it though.
-Old epic gear largely made obsolete by the above sentence. No idea if it will get upgraded, or if there are plans to do so.
-Quite a few players have left due to bugs, more bugs, new bugs, and due to the above two sentences.
-There were layoffs recently at Turbine. It made the news.
-DDO's halloween event, Mabar, was a disaster. Likely caused by the above sentence.

Still fun to play though. Regarding pug raids, Shroud is still run frequently, as are VON and Chronoscope. The others tend to be more rare including the new epic raid CiTW. Forget about Abott or Titan, you'll almost never see these ran anymore, again due to the above reasons.

[JohnRove]

Welcome Back. I rarely pay too much attention to the PuG scene, but I haven;t heard more complaints than usual from guildies about it.

[baletraeger]

Pug scene has actually been very healthy lately, with daily runs of most of the epic raids (excepting MA) - even Abbot is running more frequently.
As mentioned, we had a somewhat lackluster Mabar this year, but it's coming back in about a week or so 'fixed'.

You'll be super busy with grinding to 25 and building out Epic Destinies as well.

Good Journeys!

[SemiraLynn]

Thank you for the welcome everyone.

I'm noticing a lot of trends mentioned here. So far I've had fairly good luck with pugs. I post and go and all of them have had at least a couple of people join along the way. I've seen a couple of raid posts but those seem to be very sparse.

I've been on the lookout for a Shadow Crypt farm for a few days but haven't had the fortune to find an existing group. I'm flagged for it but hate leading this one. I might try to form a group Thursday if anyone is in the 9-11 range and wants to run it multiple times (hoping for 7 runs).