Death is Life

Nothing focuses the mind like the prospect of imminent death.

This has been a slow run of Dungeons & Dragons Online.  My schedule hasn't come entirely to a halt as it has done several times in the past, but even allowing for my diversion into Valheim it's taken me a long time to make my way through this latest run of DDO.  Partly this has been due to the structure of this game not lending itself to the 2 hours a day I usually do - it's very episodic, and it's only ocassionally that I finish one dungeon and dive immediately into another.  Mostly though it's just been my mood.

I don't know these days that there's any game that infallibly spurs me out of these torpors - even City of Heroes failed to do so last summer when I spent an interminable amount of time in Praetoria - but after reflecting some more on my last post I decided to take on some on-level dungeons, and that did it.

That's not to say it can't be fun to cruise idly through a game.  Part of the magic of Valheim is that it intersperses long periods of relaxing exploration and building with short bursts of intense action, and similarly it can be enjoyable to go through lower level dungeons in this game, for a while.  I think I may have done a bit too much of that during this run though.

Entering the Temple of Elemental Evil certainly livened things up.  It's on-level, and I needed to rethink my weapon loadouts, my skill trees and my tactics to get more than a few rooms into the first level of the Temple.  Admittedly this isn't the most efficient way to level, since the stacking re-entry penalty means I spent some time in the dungeon before deciding that I'd come back another day.  I'd as soon as not repeat my experience of The Illusionarium and get all the way through this place for a grand reward of 0XP.

It was interesting though, and I enjoyed the atmosphere and the sense of real danger that came with the knowledge that if I was careless I could die to almost any encounter.  Likewise there's a greater sense of satisfaction from coming through those fights.  The Temple is vast, and I'm very far from done with it.

My foray into another level 7 dungeon, the Scorched Cavern, was more successful, and good fun.  I used a lot of spells, drank a lot of potions and killed a lot of mephits.  The choice of end rewards was rather uninspiring, but the real reward was the experience of playing through it.