Swyftfeets guide to DDO ( a brain dump ) for new players

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Who this guide is aimed at: This is an overall guide for someone who has heard about the game, wants to start, or only a few weeks/months in who are overwhelmed by the enormity of DDO and the lack of any explicit directions on how to DDO.

This aimed at people who are willing to spend some money on a VIP sub and pony up for at least the Menace of the Underdark and Shadowfell Conspiracy so you get access to Epic Destinies. Its also got some info on what and what not to buy in the store. Theres a pack for $59 in the store that gives you these expansions with Raveloft which you can decide if you want to go that route around level 10 through 12.

It’s a mishmash brain-dump of general knowledge I wish I knew when I started the game a couple years ago. There’s a non-zero chance that some of the information is wrong through ignorance. I don’t know everything about the game, some of the content is subjective, some objective.

What this guide is not:
It’s not a step-by-step guide with build, quest, and level progression.

Is the game dying/dead?
No, not if your reading this.

Is the game laggy and buggy?
Sometimes, but even with the downsides its fun as all get out. No other MMO has the character building aspect that matches this game. You can also accomplish something even if you only have 15 minutes to play.

Is it expensive?
First, I should preface everything is possible by earning points by playing. It might take more time than you have left on earth if you play occasionally, or you're a lot more patient than I am if you can accomplish this.

But, if you're like me the answer is somewhat resounding yes, I would not recommend it to someone who has problems paying their normal bills. Entertainment per hour wise, If you can trade 1 night at the movies a month or one dinner out, its worth it. Its $15 for a sub per month. Less if you buy in qty. You're looking at an addition 150sh dollars to get all the expansions and significantly more to unlock all the classes. thats cash out of pocket, almost all of it can be bought in game using DDO points.

You don’t have to do it all at once. And you most definitely shouldn't. Again you *can* do it by earning points from questing, but it would take too long for me.

With a subscription netting 500 per month and favor farming you get enough points organically to afford things you will want/need.

Equipment wise:
This can run on an atari 2600. Seriously tho its not that gear dependant. I personally wouldn’t play without 2 monitors. One for main screen set for full screen windowed mode and the other for the DDO wiki/compedium. There's maps and hints and all kinds of info that’s useful that would be too crazy to be alt tabbing about. Can you do it yes. Not my cup of tea.


Are there active players at my level?

Yes, given how DDO is playedvs other MMOs, there are experienced players at almost every level all the time. its not a wasteland to cap. After you do the opening quest hit the O button and join a group or start your own LFG by typing something like “noob needs a tutorial someone anyone help me please” in the comment line, I'm willing to bet it would get a bite in no time at all. 90% of the player base I’ve run into is very friendly and most will help a new person. We want more subscribers, it keeps the servers alive for a game we love. if a group is running reapers or r1 in the comment, send the group leader a tell and ask if they mind dragging a noob about, most likely it will be fine.


Should you get a VIP subscription?
I would say until you get out of the harbor its not really required. Test the water, see if you like the game. Korthos (the starting Zone) and the next zone from there The Harbor are all free to play quests. You can even google “DDO F2P quests by level.” There’s a lot of content for FTP but you will run into things where you’re gated. Like achieving enough favor for more bank space or getting favor enough for more bag space, some other unlocks I will mention below.

Now why would you want to?
1) It gives you all the quest packs, but not expansions, its a ton of available content from packs alone.
2) It gives access to all the races while your sub is active. (pick F2P race in case you let sub expire)
3) It gives you some shared bank space
4) It gives you a 10% bonus to xp
5) It allows you to open the quests on whatever difficulty you want to play at. If you aren’t VIP and are a 1st life character in order to get max favor from a quest you have to play it 3 times. Normal->Hard->Elite. More on this later.
6) Gives you 500 store points a month
7) A weekly gold roll
8) Allows you to skip 1 quest per saga
9) Keeps the servers running and pays the Devs (even if you don’t like every decision they make)

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DDO is a bit different than most MMOs, in that its much better to concentrate on one main character. This game is somewhat alt unfriendly, due to how character power is achieved. The main method inside the life your playing is to increase a character’s power is standard level progression, ability points and Epic Destinies.

But the real character power that gives you a leg up is past life progression. The metagame inside the game is the True Reincarnation (TR).

Essentially there are 4 main types of past lives. Each past life gives you a past life feat enabled at level 1 of your next life after reincarnation.

1) There’s Heroic Past lives which gives you a past life based on the class you played to 20, due to being able to multi class generally it’s the class that has the most amount of levels or if it’s an even split its alphabetical with exceptions for newer classes. These stack 3 times. Don’t get stuck on this yet.
2) There’s racial past lives which is based on which race you chose at creation. These stack 3x.
You get to choose either a heroic or a racial past life when you TR at 20. You don’t get both.
3) There are Epic Past lives which many will argue give you the best bang for your buck as far as character power. These stack 3x
4) Lastly There’s Iconic Past lives which can give you a stance or click ability that is available from level 1 as well as the heroic past life and you start at lvl 15, but you have to xp all the way to 30. You don’t get an epic past life, you iconic TR to 1. These stack 3x

See a pattern yet?
Theres 45 Heroic, 42 racial, 24 Iconic and 48 Epic lives available

It takes a vet ~18-30 hrs per heroic or racial, and roughly 9hrs per epic. for an Iconic its prob 12sh.


All in all, there are over 159 different past lives achievable on one character. So for someone who plays around 10 hrs a week that's in the zipcode of 4.5-5 solid years of game play. Not all are required to MIN/MAX a character, but each will incrementally improve that one character in some minor way. These stay with that one character and are not server wide, that’s why DDO is not considered alt friendly.

Most Vets will agree that Epic past lives (EPLs) > Racial Past Lives (RPLs) > Heroic Past Lives (HPLs) > Iconic PLs (IPLs) with exceptions.

3x paladin past lived gives you +30 healing amplification, that’s pretty useful on just about every build.
1x Wizard gives you a feat to take that gives you +1 Dice Check (DC) for every spell school.
3x Tiefling Scoundrel past lives gives you +30% run speed toggle at level 1 which is awesome unless you have an upgraded quiver of alacrity (which is from a raid that gets run rarely or the anniversary gift which may still be active at the time of this writing).

The other source of character progression is reaper points. These are achieved by playing a quest on reaper difficulty. We’ll get into that later.

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You have 5 ranks per level each representing 20% of that levels XP. For each rank (or circular pip on the right side of the bar) filled completely of your current level you gain an ability point, except for the last. You get 4 ability points for each level for a total of 80.

You can bank experience, meaning you can keep getting experience till 1 xp point short of getting 2 levels higher than the current level shown on your xp bar. Meaning you can bank 1xp short of getting lvl 3 at level 1. This is what people call “capping” or being “capped out.” Some players like to bank to get all 4 attribute points at once when they level or because the next level may not have as many quests available that they like to do.

You get XP by completing quests, optional objectives inside the quest or killing mobs in slayers zones. You can also consume the xp stones you get form daily rolls.
Every day you should do your daily dice. Every week you should do your weekly. You can access it from the main menu or clicking the little diamond next to your nameplate on the UI. I usually bank the ones worth 300xp+ on a bank toon to consume when I do a True Reincarnation (TR) down to lvl 1.

It takes double the 1st life experience to gain a rank on your second life and triple on your third life.

You get more XP per quest by completing it on the hardest difficulty you think you can do on the 1st time you complete the quest and a bonus for each time you complete it on a different difficulty. The reason you see so many people playing R1 through the levels is because they need as much bonus XP as possible to advance. You don’t get any more regular xp for playing beyond R1, but you do get more RXP for each incrementing number. Its generally not worth the difficulty of doing a non-legendary (lvl30+) quest on anything more than R1.

Another Reason to pony up for VIP is Delara’s Tomb. Completion of that quest line gives you a trinket “Voice of the master” which is a 5% bonus to xp.

Other ways to increase the xp you get inside the quest is to smash breakables, find hidden doors, disable traps, killing more or less than a certain amount of mobs.

Reaper Experience:
Playing a quest on reaper gets you reaper XP (RXP), the more point you get the more powerful you get in reaper mode. You also get more HP for each point you spend in reaper trees. But if you’re wondering why some folks have triple your HP at the same level as you in a reaper quest, this is the reason.

You can generally avoid reaper leveling until your 3rd life. I have seen people on first life characters with reaper wings (75 reaper points). Would I do it? No. but its possible. I would suggest you glom onto Reaper groups when you hit 29. You get far more Rxp by doing legendary quests than you do through leveling.

Reaper Questing can become easier than Elite questing after you have 20 or so reaper points for some classes, mainly casters. Reason being is that you get bonus HP for each reaper point you spend and while killing mobs theres a chance that a little ball "lost soul" appears in the air that will give you mana points. no such bonus for melee classes.

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You get favor by completing quests.

You get the base favor for doing it on normal, 2x for doing it on hard and 3x for doing it on elite or any Reaper level. You don't get any more for favor running a quest once you've run it on elite or higher.

All Favor is valuable, some much more than others. You get a fair bit of store points for hitting first time favor thresholds on each server, this is called favor farming.

With general overall aggregated favor you can unlock Drow Race(400), lvl 4 character creation (1000), 32 point starting characters and one +2 ability Tome of choice (1750) , Favored Soul (2500) , lvl 7 starting characters(3000) all the way to +5 tome(5000 that’s a hell of a slog and requires access to quest packs and expansions)

Ones people tend to run every life:
Coin Lord Favor:
75 gets you 20 more inventory slots
150 + a collapsible portable hole and some platinum gets you 20 more
The rest you have to purchase in the store.
Kundarak
Same deal
75 + platinum gets you 1 more bank slot for 20 spaces
150 + more plat gets you an additional 20
Argonesson
gets you the portable hole for the extra bag above.
Theres a lot more one time unlocks:

Cannith one time per server:
150 gets you artificer

Per character one time unlocks:

(Universal Tree) Vistani Knife Fighter from Ravenloft Expansion
(Universal Tree) Inquisitive from Sharn Expansion
(Universal Tree) Feydark Illusionist from Feywild expansion
(Universal Tree) Harper from eveningstar quests
(Universal Tree) Falconry (from Free Agents) this one is a PITA, prob easier to purchase since you need to run titan raid to get enough favor to unlock and no one runs it.

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DDO Store
Now that we’ve covered favor, it’s a good idea to cover what to buy and how not to make poorer choices (dont shoot me devs):

Things to save your points for:

Greater Tomes of Learning:
By life three your probably going to want to by a heroic greater tome of learning. Gives you a +50% bonus to the first completion of the quest.
An Epic tome of learning is helpful for every epic life. No matter how many past lives you have it still takes the same xp per epic past life.

Ability Tomes:
These are go big or don’t go at all. It is unwise to purchase anything but the maximum available +8 supreme ability tome (gives you +8 to every ability). Its like 5400 store points which is hefty. DDO is not alt friendly. You can get a discount by buying the 3995 store point 10th anniversary pack. Doing it 1 at time or incrementally upgrading costs insanely more than buying the supreme upfront. Just save until you can get it. I don’t know why the price schema is so horribly punishing to people willing to spend money in the store, but it is that terrible.

Skill Tome:
Mostly not worth it, but it’s the only place to my knowledge to get a +5 to UMD. This one is worth it in my opinion. It can make the difference between getting a raise dead off during a heated battle or not.
You can get +3 tomes for completing epic sagas in game and some bigger ones drop in raids.

Potions:
Major Slayers Pots for making epic lives go quick. I tend to buy them for characters that have done enough sagas that don’t need +3 tomes anymore. Do not waste them in heroics. Use only in epics.
XP pots I tend to by a few when they are on sale. I wouldn’t do it for the first 10 or so lives.

Expansions:
Most are available thru the store. Ravenloft Lvl 10& 29 gear if you didn’t purchase the bundle is great. Most of us used RL gear all the way to 29 where we replaced it with lvl 29 ravenloft gear. Sharn right after it. It’s a decent boost from ravenloft stuff. Feywild is unneeded but good if you have expendable cash.

Classes and Iconics
If I could do it all over the very first Class/Iconic I would buy is Tiefling Scoundrel providing you own epic destinies. Doing three Iconic Past lives of this gives you a plus 30% runspeed toggle plus a heroic past life. This one is worth it first. Then do all the others as you get a hankering to try new things.

IF you havent purchased EDs , Warlock would be a good 1st or next following Scoundrel as it’s a good class to complete almost any epic destinies and racials. Even though its not a powerhouse of a class and has been nerfed to all get out from its glory day, its a very reliable slow and steady that is very difficult to screw up... Its very good early levels, doesn't require the keyboard skills of a professional pianist can reliably survive r1 content under geared even on a first life as an enlightened spirit build post level 12.

If I had to prioritize providing you bought the $59 expansion bundle and are VIP, meaning you have access to Epic Destinies.
1) Learning Tomes (epic 1st) Heroic by 3rd life
2) Sharn
3) Tiefling scoundrel

• Makes great favor farmers on other servers
• Makes great bank toons.
• Lvl 15 Spellsingers can destroy Coin lord and House K questlines with sla Sonic blast and Shout. 2 levels of rog make GH traps a little easier if you dont have twink gear.
• Sprint boosts (8AP in WC)
• fast running +1% per bard level (7 AP in SB), no need to farm a horse on a server your just trying to get to 100 favor on...
• Plus Dimension door for fast exits. Lvl 4 spell, choice at char level 10.

4) Warlock
5) +8 Supreme ability (or anniversary pack with bank space and +8tome if still available)
6) Feydark
7) +5 UMD
8) Biggest collectable bag
9) Biggest augment bag.
10) Slayer pots.
11) Classes as you need them.
12) Getting to 1250 craftable storage slots
13) Xp pots
14) Character slots when on sale
15) Bank slots when on sale
16) Inventory slots when on sale

What not to buy:
1) Veteran Status (can be earned)
2) Build points (can be earned)
3) Universal Trees (can be earned, exception Falconry too much of a PITA)
4) Piecemeal ability tomes or incremental upgrades
5) Almost anything else. Literally do not spend points until you’ve got the 10 items above covered.

How to get more points:
Farm favor on other servers, buy them, keep VIP running, keep TR'ing (Every life gets me 500-700sh points via favor.) on average Im gettng about 1300sh store points in a month which enough for a class or a Iconic.

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Now this is where some of my prejudices might affect the information included here. Can you start with any class? Sure, all are viable, and you certainly can pick whatever you want if you have access to that class. But on a first life build your class choice will affect some things later down the line. Here is the first part where someone who is completely ignorant might want to take some advice.

For a solo player I suggest either a pale trapper (18Wiz 2 Rog) or a Paladin. The paletrapper if you like playing caster styles as the past life for wizard gives you a +1 to Every spell school DC. I usually take this feat by at least level 12 on every caster Ive ever created. Paladin is good in that it gives you healing amp. Every heal that lands on you will be more powerful, its passive.


Class Builds Matter
How you build your character from the start really matters to how successful you will be able to solo. Now if you have a whole group of friends playing together, it will matter a lot less. But your starting attributes can make or break a build. I recommend searching for first-life, no-tome friendly builds in the forums. If you screw up you may not be able to get stuff you really want later without buying your way out of it. You’ve been warned. If you have only a couple hours on a character and you’ve screwed up, just scrap it and start fresh.

If you are perusing builds and it mentions any of the classes that you don’t get from F2P or any universal trees that you dont have or requires a Tome, avoid them until you have those trees unlocked via favor or are prepared to purchase the requirements from the store. You can a lot of times modify a build for 1st life characters but ensure you use a planner so you know what starting attributes are required to unlock the feats at the appropriate level.


Feats
Besides your class defining attribute, why do starting attributes matter so much? Feats. A lot of feats have a minimum requirement in an ability or skill score. For instance, 2 handed fighting requires 15 base Strength to make it available, this is the value you must achieve before gear is accounted for. So just putting on some gauntlets that give you +5 STR if your base is 10 is not going to cut it. Some feats have a minimum Base Attack Bonus (BAB) and a minimum attribute bonus. So if you have a particular kind of fighting Two Handed Fighting (THF), Two Weapon Fighting (TWF) or Single Weapon Fighting SWF, make sure you accommodate the requirements to progress with your starting attributes. This matters less if you have ability tomes, but on a brand-new starting character you have less points to spend 28 vs 32 on your second life vs 36 on your third things can get tight. Which is why again I suggest Dwarven Barbarian. Pump Strength to max and put the rest into Constitution. If you have any leftover INT isn’t a terrible place to put it for more skill points. Then from that point on just put all points into strength when available when you level.

Skills
The number you get per level is based on intelligence and class.
Generally if you can pump UMD it’s a good idea to do with any left over points.

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Gear Tetris
Gear is where you get a lot of your character ability to survive and kill other things faster than they kill you. This is in general, there are so many edge cases and obscure abilities and equipment.

What stacks:
greatest Equipment + greatest insightful + greatest quality + greatest artifact + greatest competence + stuff you got through past lives and ability trees.
Generally you get the greatest concealment + the greatest incorporeal for chances for mobs to miss you.
Your max dodge is limited to your max dex bonus by armor/tower shield type.

What doesn’t stack:
Stuff with the same type of modifier. If you have +77 equipment bonus to positive spell power on one item and +64 equipment bonus to positive spell power on another you get +77. Same goes with DC check bonuses and fortification and all the other stuff.

Things that I obsess over:
• Maximizing your primary class based stat(s) and Constitution.
• Melee or Ranged stuff if not spell caster
• Spell DCs and Spell power and Spell crit of the appropriate school(s) , and crit multiplier if caster.

The list for this just too crazy to address for this post. If someone wants to address the melee stuff have at it. I don’t know it all.

For casters:
Anything that augments your max caster level is awesomesauce.

Inventory management:
(Gem, Collectable, Ingredient, augment) you can get free small ones of the first 3 from just talking to a couple different people in the harbor.
Baudry gives you a red Collectable, Fitzpatrick gives you a gem bag and theres a guy up by the entrance to the market that gives you an ingredient bag.
When they are in your inventory click on them and set them to autocollect.
When you start seeing spillage of things into your inventory, sell all your gems they have no value other than selling to a vendor.
For the collectables you can go to a bank and providing you have VIP you will have some storage. Click on the right tab. Just drag the whole red or green bag over the the window and it will automatically dump all the contents into your shared storage.
You can search the wiki where to buy the biggest bags you can afford in game or purchase the gargantuan ones from the store as you want.

Mysterious remnants
Pick these up when you see them. They can be turned into augments LVL 1,4,8,12 ect ect.) go to the vendor in the hall of hero’s and you can fill weapons and armor that have augment slots with appropriate colored augments as you need. They used to be bad, but with a recent update they are now currently on par with crafted loot. I use them all the time.

Potions, scrolls and Wands:
Always have the following potions:
• Cure Curse
• Cure Disease
• Cure Blindness
• Cure Poison
• Lesser Restoration


if you have UMD:
you can test your chance of actually getting a wand or scroll off by hovering over the item icon, it will give you a percentage. you can bump this by spending points in UMD at each level up, having items that give UMD bonus and maxing your charisma via items.

Have a Wand of Shield around level 5sh if your class cant cast them. Mobs will start casting Magic Missile and they really can hurt on elite or reaper mode.

Scrolls

• Raise Dead
• Heal
• Teleport

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HotBars:
You have access to 20 of them.

You can pop them out to make more buttons available to click on. You just choose the little up arrow and down arrows to access the different number and the little diagonal button to pop it out. I always pop out 2 through 5 at the start. You’ll come up with a layout your comfortable with.

I always have 2 or 3 Vertical on the right to put things like potions scrolls and wands and other item clickies. If you’re playing a caster, I always put my spell components in the appropriate level per slot on one so I can see if I need to restock without searching through my inventory.
What do you put on your hotbar?

Gear slots
What you normally wear and right next to it stuff you need occasionally equip like items with Underwater action, true-seeing or featherfall ect.


Weapon sets:
Equip the weapons you want from your inventory and drag it (them) over the green squares to the bottom left of your inventory tab. If you have mainhand offhand drag both onto the same square. You can then move the weapon set to your hotbar.

Abilities & Spells
Hit C for character sheet and go to abilities tab and spells, drag those down to your hot bar.
Feats
On the feats tab of Character sheet. Some feats are passive, The hexagonal feats, you dont need to do anything with them.
Some are active, like cleave, they are square in shape. These can be melee abilities, spells or toggles. drag these to hotbars.

Metamagics
These are feats that you take as a caster that improve a spell in several different ways at the cost of more mana per spell.
The really nice thing is if you have an Ability you gained through one of your ability trees that is a Spell Like Ability (SLA) you can apply a metamagic for free. A maximized empowered lvl 1 spell would take about 1/3rd your mana to do a lot of damage to a mob, but if its an SLA its only the base cost of the spell. Nice tossing those around at low level.
To add metamagics you can either toggle them globally by dragging it to your hotbar and if you click on it you will see a little blue effect going around the metmagic, click once more to toggle it off. If you keep these on you will run out of mana in no time whatsoever. So generally, people only use them on SLAs or during Boss fights. There is no prize for ending the quest with a full mana bar. The flip side is you should arrive at the boss fight with enough mana to be useful. You’ll figure it out in short order, or you die.
For a melee or ranged character you can drag the autoattack and keep it toggles on, under the basic node +. This will keep you swinging on the highlighted mob.

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Hit “P” sort by quest level and completion status
Make sure you’ve completed on Elite for things you want the favor for if the faction is something you want.
Go in quest, break boxes, kill mobs. Pick up every collectable you see... Try not to die.

Author's Warning: if your first life and you see "Proof is in the Poison" in the market place at level 4, and think to youreself I'll try that next, dont. Just go hit yourself in the head with a ball-peen hammer for about 30 minutes in the garage and come back to the game. The results are about the same.

Theres no shame in doing Normal on first life and Hard life for life 2. life three you will need to do elite and start breaking into r1s to keep from having to repeat content.

If you die and youre not in reaper, Do not use a cake. take the xp ding and run as fast as you can back to the quest, you have 5 min. If you’re in reaper unless it’s the final fight of the pit save the cake, just repeat the quest. Even better play in a group.

Guilds
Get in a guild, most Servers have a level 200sh invite any noobie helper guild. These can be filled with all sort of different personalities. You don’t have to talk or even group with these folks, but you may find some friends or just use the ship for buffs or a crafting/selling/repair/teleportation hub.
1st thing I do is run to the guild ship and click on the gears of the main deck this gives you about a billion little buffs. If you hit escape and go to options and then choose ui you can search for guild and make these condense into one buff.
Then find the dining room on the guild and bind yourself to the guild ship. If you die you release here and then can click on the gears and fill your HP and mana bar. Nifty.


Hirelings
Hirelings AI needs some love. But they can be useful if used correctly. I mostly park them and use them between battles to top health or mana. If you just have them tag along they will run for whatever thing will likely kill them the fastest and die as soon as possible.
For early levels Lvl 1 and Lvl 3 barbarians set to attack aggressive mode will mostly clear a dungeon for you. If they die so what take them to a rez shrine and let them rest. Good robot go kill get me xp.

After level 3-4sh you’ll probably want to swap to a healer of some sort. Always choose the one that has divine vitality if you’re a caster. These guys can give you a couple hundred mana by clicking the hell out of that button. Definitely park them using the left most button and call them to you with the feet button when you are safe. You’ll get the hang of it when to let them follow and when to park them after you’ve done the quests a bunch of times and know where the traps are.
Problem is once you get them to appropriate level to raise dead they will not rez you if they are parked. Can turn into quite the bit of fun trying to pull it off without aggro’ing what killed you. And if you yoink and they yoink probably dead for good.

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Fast forward through all kinds of fun and frustration.

Congrats your now ready to Racially True Reincarnate (RTR), Heroic True Reincarnate(HTR) or continue on with epic leveling.

If you dont have Epic Destinies I would not recommend doing any epic leveling. See more on the next post.

How to HTR/RTR:

First you will have to have to get a heroic heart of wood or heart of blood for racial. You can get these as follows:

Trade 20 Tokens of the Twelve for an appropriate heart by talking to the big rock elemental off to the right of the Tower of the Twelve
Completing Eberron Quests completed on Epic Elite end chests which will have full tokens or lesser difficulties will give you fragments.
You can trade fragments for tokens of the twelve until you have 20 at the crafting station next to the elemental. you just put the fragments in the mouth and hit crunch.

You can alternatively buy one in the store. Not worth it.

How I TR:

• First I clean the inventory as much as possible:
• Sell components
• Sell Gems
• Sell/disolve/feed to sentient any thing that you wont use again

Keep:

• Raid Loot
• BTC stuff
• Really Good Blues - you can transfer to a bank alt via shared bank

you should have enough room that you can store all your items even what youre wearing in your bag space. All of it will go into a special bank called your TR cache. so you can keep it for the next life.

What I have done since im kind of a packrat, is I have bank toons with an appropriate last name "onetofour" "fivetoten" "heroicRL" "elvntofourteen" "HeroicSharn" "highheroics" "Scrollbank" "potionbank" "lowEpic" "EpicRL" "EpicSharn" "epicFW" These are all iconics that Ive got all the bag/bankspace on. I just buy character slots when they are on sale. its cheaper than shared bank space. only takes a couple hours to zerg through CoinLords, House k and Gianthold for the Argonesson reward: collapsible portable hole. It also makes it really easy to find gear in this fashion when you hit the benchmark levels. I can easily sort my shared bank by level and load these toons up.


Find your Next Class Build. On your Next life you will get a 32 point build instead of a 28pt build and can open quests on hard if your F2P. On your 3rd you get 36 points and can open quests on Elite if youre F2P.

Go to hall of heroes Enter the little reincarnation room on the bottom floor. Talk to the wisp. Select the appropriate Heroic/Racially Reincarnation. put the heart in the slot and follow the menu to the end. you will get a message in a second or two saying you are prepped to reincarnate. Some people exit the game completely after this, because in the past people have lost gear during this process. I never have lost anything but I always Exit completely. Not sure if its an old wives tale. After you log back into character selection there will be a special icon on your character. click it and enter your name. Congrats you've now reincarnated it will take you directly into the character creation.

Thoughts on Heroic Vs Racial Reincarnation:

Most people when starting or learning about DDO immediately think you should go for heroic completionist. It does give you +2 to every ability score, but you need access to all the classes.

Also if you run an Iconic character you get the dominant Heroic Past life of your character and you start at level 15. So why would you go from 1-20 on something you can do by going 15-30 later, which is much much easier skipping all the underpowered lower levels and much faster to grind out. All of this can make this makes taking a Heroic Past life less attractive.

When you get a heroic past life you get a passive bonus that can stack 3 times, 1 for each time you HTR that specific class. Some of these dont make any sense for a caster to take and some dont make any sense for a melee to take. there are a few that are universally or almost universally useful:

3x Paladin past lives as mentioned earlier give you +30% healing amplification. This will amplify any incoming heal from a divine caster by 30%. its a very good past life to have all 3.
3x Artificer gives you a +3 bonus to UMD which can be clutch to getting a timely raise dead/resurrection if you are playing a class where a UMD is non-class skill and aren't playing a divine caster or charisma based class.
3x Barbarian is good for 30HP

Function Specific Past lives:
1x Wizard gives you spell penetration and a feat that almost every class that can cast spells will work into their build because it gives a +1 universal DC bonus to spell casting for every skill.
If you like evocation nuking Sorc past lives are good (a lot of caster classes have use for Evocation)
If you like ranged DPS Ranger for ranged damage
IF you like Melee Monk are good. for Melee damage.

The rest fall under much less useful category unless you are prepping a main for a specific end game build.

Racial True Reincarnation and Racial Completionist

Racial Reincarnations while a much longer slog, are incrementally more powerful than heroic completionist.

On your first reincarnation of a race you get a skill bonus that is largely not terribly useful.
On your second repeat of that Race you get an Attribute Bonus that Stacks with everything This is really really good.
On your third you get a Racial Point that you get to spend rather than a one of your base ability points in the racial tree. This can be super powerful or not at all helpful depending on the race your playing.

When you get 3 stacks of every race, you get an additional +2 to all ability and skills awarded automatically without taking up a feat slot. which is really really nice. All in all it adds up to

+5 Charisma and Dexterity
+4 to Wisdom, Intelligence and Constitution
+3 to Strength

+ 4 to spot
+3 to most of the other skills

and 13 racial points to spend!

Versus the +2 to ability and skills which takes up a feat slot from Heroic completionist but its 39 lives leveling from 1-20 vs 15 that you can use an Iconic to shortcut your advancement.

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Quest Difficulty level in Epics is a totally different ball park than heroic.

If you can solo R1s in Heroic, soloing an Epic R1s or even Elite may not be possible or likely. Epic hard is about on par with Heroic R1 depending on the release date of the questline. Newer quests are much harder than old content.

Borderlands Has some really good gear ML21 and some nice weapons that will carry you epics. The ML20 Weapons are through a turn in you get from the ores you get out of the epic chests. You also can keep farming the quests till you get a golden horseshoe which makes your mount run super fast.

The gearing from 20-28 is pretty lackluster on any of the old content that hasnt been updated. most people just use a mishmash of Sharn Set + boarderlands with maybe a crafted upgrade around 24 or 25 for Con and main stat.

A lot of old timers will skip a majority of quests and sagas and do a mishmash of slayer zones, Evening star challenges and a few really high xp quests:
Kings Forest ( Grim Disturbance rare in the swamp area)
Orchard of the Macabre
Barovia
and finishing it off with Feydark or Thunderholme.

High reward or fast quests
Lords of Dust
Spies in the House
Offering of Blood
Von 3-6
WizKing (Chamber of Rayium)
Invitation to Dinner

Most of these can be run daily but the ones like Von3 and Wizking really lose value after you start getting optional ransack. Doing the ebberon quests at least on Elite will net you a Token of the Twelve.

I recommend on the first few epic lives you knock out the full Sagas, as many as you have purchased content to get a random skill tome rewards. These all give at least one +3 and more if you complete sagas on higher difficulty. The incremental improvements are really helpful.

Big ones to get are Heal, Spellcraft, Jump, Search, Spot, Disable Device and Open Lock.

Dont take the tomes until you've completed all the sagas you can since the rewards are random but do not change once youve talked to the NPC. Make a list marking your duplicates and hit as many of the useful ones as possible.

when you get all the major tomes done you can stop doing sagas if you dont like to do them and just do the easy path of leveling.

Epic Destinies
Epic Destinies are yet again another method to drastically increase character power. There is a revamp occurring so I'm going to wait on what to write here.

Active Destiny
There is a revamp occurring so I'm going to wait on what to write here.
Twists
There is a revamp occurring so I'm going to wait on what to write here.

Epic True Reincarnation (ETR)

there are 48 achievable Epic Past Lives. 4 in each of 4 spheres stack-able 3 times each. Each of these gives a passive bonus from the specific destiny and a passive from the sphere that combined is arguably better than the passives you get from HTRs. These past lives will appear in your feats list as a toggle you can enable from level 1. you can only have 1 toggle per sphere active at any time.

The method to reincarnate is similar to HTR/RTR in that you need an ingredient (heart seeds) that you can get from questing or you can purchase from the store.

You need 6 million karma in the sphere you want to do a reincarnation from. Karma for all intents and purposes is the same as xp. you earn a 1:1 karma per xp. it gets dumped in the sphere of your active destiny when you achieve a normal experience point.

You can turn 100 commendations of valor into a seed. You get them at the end of every Epic quest from the quest giver as a reward option when you complete the quest at levels 20-29. Take these every time unless the gear is a must have.

When you hit level 30 you also get 2 heart seeds from any epic quest as a reward option from the quest giver. You get them once daily for that quest, or at a 1st time completion for each difficulty Normal-Elite. A really really fast way to get 30+ of these zerg borderlands at the level you did them at if you did epic versions. then hit all the other difficulties in your big boy/big girl pants. you can make the remainder up by either joining reaper xp farming groups or clicking on the commendations of valor and exchanging them to seeds.

When you hit 29 and 30 first time bonus reaper farming is amazing on legendary quests. You'll gain more reaper xp in a few quests than you did the whole life running R1s up to this point.

When you have 42 of these heart seeds you can click on the stack in your inventory and exchange them for either an Iconic Heart of wood or an Epic heart of wood. The process is similar to HTR/RTR. you visit the same bloke in the reincarnation grove and choose the destiny you want to reincarnate from follow the dialog and you'll be ready to reincarnate.

Its a bit different in that you go back to 20 not 1. You keep all quest completion status (meaning you cant zerg slayers to cap and you lose first time quest completion bonuses for difficulties you've already done) and you also have a chance to redo all the leveling choices (feat, spell and skill wise, your class picks remain the same) should you decide to pursue another Epic life.

If you are NOT doing another round of 20-30 leveling heres a few hints:

• do not put any points into intelligence. don't pick intelligence for level ups. it keeps your skill points low
• dont worry about following your build path that you used regarding feats. just choose whatever is available
• pick skills that are not in your class list so you can burn through the process as fast as possible.
• pick any spell. Don't worry about it.

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Creating a path | thinking about next life | racial repeater builds

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once you get to the point where platinum isnt really an issue for you its likely a good time to start crafting.

theres a crafting tutorial on the DDOwiki.

Vooduspyce has a great tutorial how to level up.

Things that I found useful to craft:
(250 crafting) ML1 true-seeing goggles of underwater action - on a green with a colorless augment slot. I put my XP augment in there for levels 1-9
(250 Crafting) ML1 Robe of fearsome invulnerability - awesome for levels 1-4 really reduces incoming damage due to its DR/5 Magic
(250 Crafting) ML3 sonic damage everbright club- just to beat oozes if melee

metalline/aligned weapons for DR bypass, prob have to buy the mats on the auction house but needed if your going melee.

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Herioc completionist is now a free feat autogranted at lvl 3.

EDs are completely re-done. You only need to have purchased them and then go into the portal at the epic trainer. You go in every portal inside the room and talk to each person to get access and points to spend.

PaleTrapper 2rog-18wiz, pure pally and pure barbarian are all still a very good starting character builds.