Liquid Assets

The most interesting Drow in the world doesn't always drink potions but...

Money is never in short supply in an MMO.  Gold (or credits or inf or whatever the in-game currency is called) is rarely further away than the next group of mobs.  If they don't drop actual gold they'll drop items (or perhaps body parts) that can be sold to vendors for gold.  If only it were so easy to replenish out-of-game currency, but wandering out into the world to kill people and take their stuff isn't called being an adventurer in the real world, it's called being a serial killer, and society tends to frown upon that kind of thing.

Cash may come slowly at the lower levels, but it never stops, and as a character ascends to higher levels it's not unusual for them to find themselves sitting on a pile of gold that Smaug hmself might be envious of, and having nothing much to spend it on.

So every MMO has - or should have - one or more gold sinks to drain some of this excess wealth out of the game.  It's taken quite a while for me to find one in Dungeons & Dragons Online.

Up until around level 7 I had no use for gold in this game beyond minor repair bills, and even though I was disassembling every unused magic item into crafting materials rather than vendoring them I was still accruing wealth at what felt like an unusually fast pace.  That DDO uses platinum rather than gold as its main unit of currency only added to that feeling, since during my time playing pen and paper D&D this was a far less commonly used coin than gold.  Now though I have something to spend at least some of it on, and that something is healing potions.

It's only now that I'm feeling the need of these.  The starter potions of cure light wounds I accumulated on Korthos Island saw me through to level 4, so rarely were they used, and not long after I finally used the last of those I obtained a wand that cast cure minor wounds as a quest reward at the end of the final quest of The Catacombs.  That wand met most of my self-heal requirements for the next couple of levels but even with effectively unlimited charges a spell that heals only 1 or 2 HPs per cast isn't as useful at level 7 as it was at level 4.  So I've now moved on to a diet of potions of cure moderate wounds to top up my health bar between fights, and since I'm going through a fair amount of them at times that's made something of a dent in my gold.