DDO's come a long way since I started playing

[9rileystep]

When I first started playing DDO.

There was no: Aasimar, Tiefling, Wood Elf, Half Orc, Half Elf, Gnome or Dragonborn

There was no: Artificer, Druid, Monk or Warlock.

There was no: Iconic Characters

There was no: Epic Destinies

There was no: Enhancement trees

Level cap was 20

PrE's (Prestige Enhancements) were hidden abilities with hidden requirements.

Everybody's enhancements looked like today's pet enhancements. (When you ask an artificer/druid trainer to train your pet)

TR and LR were the only reincarnations.

I jumped into this game with no idea at all how to play it. I had beaten all of my xbox console video games and was just looking for something else. I love the RPG genre so when I saw that DDO was "free to play" I decided to give it a shot. I never even played D&D pen and paper version. So after carefully reading all the character descriptions I promptly chose a human paladin and flattened out all his stats.

That character made it to level 4, I was so weak that normal difficulty was giving me serious problems. I deleted him thinking maybe that paladin didn't really fit my play style.

So I created a halfling rogue next time, and promptly flattened out his stats as well (knowing absolutely NOTHING of min/max toons). The rogue made it to about level 11 mostly on grouping as he could Disable and pick locks. Until another player in quest pointed out that my character had the least amount of HP in the entire group.......by a LOT. The other player (I can't remember him to this day) explained that under NO circumstances could I dump stat or near dump stat CON.

Back to the drawing board, so I invested some money into the game. I was feeling like DDO was beating me and I took that as a challenge. I paid to unlock Warforged and a bunch of adventure packs. I created a warforged barbarian and I max stat'd CON and dumped the rest into STR. Every level up point I had went into CON and I had the highest HP Barbarian anyone on Cannith server ever saw. This guy made it all the way to level 20, however while running then end game content I noticed that I wasn't getting hardly any kills. In fact my kill count sucked out loud. I had taken useless feats (power critical and 3 toughness) and neglected taking others (Cleave, Great Cleave etc.). However I was survivable enough to collect my 20 tokens of the twelve and I TR'd into what I consider my first real (successful) toon. STR based warforged barbarian with proper feats as universally agreed upon by the DDO community.

(At which time I finally discovered that DDO already had it's own forums and a wiki chalk full of good building information and advice).


I used to hate that DDO allowed people to create failed toons. But now I see that as DDO's shining glory, there is enough leeway in DDO's toon creation it will allow you to create toons that cannot/will not work. I have played a LOT of the free online games that are available, both on xbox and PC. Most games pigeonhole your character into a specific level up system. At end game there are a 1000 toons that are exact cookie cutters of each other all chasing the exact same gear. DDO's multiclass system combined with player creativity have created some of the most awesome toons I have ever seen, in the strangest combinations I have ever seen. That is why DDO is king and that is what keeps me playing the game.