I've died once so far in DDO, around 10 hours into the game. In hindsight this was an avoidable death, and was in part due to my not entirely thinking through the way certain mechanics in this game differ from other MMOs I have played.
The big difference is in how a character's hit points is managed. There's no health regeneration in DDO, so once you start taking damage the only way to recoup it is by healing potions, spells (which I don't have access to) or resting at shrines found within the dungeons.
Shrines restore some health, not all, and each is on a 15 minute timer, so unless you have a great deal of time (and patience!) there's only so much you can gain from each shrine, though depending on the length and layout of the dungeon it's ocassionaly feasible to double back and re-visit a shrine.
I still have a couple of dozen starter potions of cure light wounds, seeing as I used none at all while on Korthos Island, but again they only restore a small amount of health, and that's where I made the first mistake that led to my demise. I drank a few potions, enough to offset the amount of health I'd usually lose in a normal fight, but not enough to bring me back up to anywhere near full health. So when I got into a fight with a greater than expected number of level 4 hobgoblins (I'm still level 3) I was only going into the fight at half health.
My second mistake echoes one of my most common causes of death back in Fallen Earth – I ran out of ammo for my ranged weapons. A stack of 100 arrows sounds like a lot, but I've been using bows a lot during this run – mostly because I picked up an excellent bow early on with added poison damage and another enhancement with a chance to give me additional temp hit points on each hit. It's too good not to use, and in this case I burned through my ammo stacks quicker than expected, entering the second dungeon with only 8 arrows left, and not finding any more after that. I'd have cheerfully exchanged any of the loot I found in the crates and barrels down there for one more stack of arrows.
That second dungeon followed on directly from the end of the previous one, with no down time in between. It was also a level 4 dungeon, unlike the level 3 I'd just completed. I didn't want to return to the surface and have to do the level 3 again later to get back to where I was, and to be fair I did fairly well, for a while, until attrition took its toll and, as I said, I mismanaged my health potions.
All of which is to say that while the individual combats in DDO aren't as showy (or to be fair as interesting) as say City of Heroes, they have a cumulative impact that is rare in other MMOs.
Comments
Post a Comment