Tuesday, 7 August 2012

Back

Hi dudes, Hannah and I are back from holiday now. Looking forward to catching up with you guys in game soon!

M+H

Thursday, 28 June 2012

Ship buffs lost again - how to help

Hi dudes,
So with today's "hotfix", Turbine managed to wipe out all ship buffs again, for the second time over the last 4 days (the first time was when the expansion went live and Hannah spent some 200k plat renewing everything).

I'm not going to waste time ranting about how unbelievably useless Turbine are and suggest a way to help fix the damage at least partially instead. They are now offering a discount coupon on ship amenity purchases in the store as a "compensation". It's worth 900 TP and can be used once per account, which is a joke for a guild like ours and doesn't even begin to cover the losses, but it still saves a little bit of plat.

If you want to help, please go to the store, put a Greater Experience Shrine contract (wa week's worth) in your cart and apply a "Ship01" coupon when you check out. The XP shrine is the most expensive amenity in terms of plat so it makes the most sense to use the coupon on it. The coupon is worth 900 TP and the shrine is 600 TP so you can try to fit in some more amenities in (the discount can't be used on anything else afaik) but, to be honest, there isn't really anything worthwhile you can buy for 300 TP or less so you could just spend the whole coupon on the shrine and not bother about anything else.
Then add the contract to buy a Greater Experience Shrine and put it on upper deck where the old one was. If it's already there, use the contract to add another week to it. If it's already full (more then 5 weeks), save it for later and use it in a week or two, but with our current number of active people I'm not even sure we'll put the 5 weeks together. I foolishly spent my coupon on another server because I thought it was 1 per server but I'll pay the plat to renew everything else.

As for the other amenities:
+2 Ability (Str/Con/etc.) Shrines and Greater Energy Resist Shrines - I'll buy a week on each for now and increase that when I have some more plat - I'm pretty broke at the moment.
Crew members - dtto, they're not expensive plat-wise so I expect it won't be a problem to renew those.
Shroud crafting Altars (Invasion and Devastation) - these are seldom used so let's leave the slots free for now, if anyone wants to use them, just buy 1 week.
Guild chest - seldom used but I'll buy one when I have some plat.

Wednesday, 27 June 2012

Thoughts on expansion after the first two days

Just re-posting what I said on the official forums, in case someone's considering buying the expansion or resubbing and is wondering whether it's worth it.

The new content itself seems very impressive. I love the HUGE new areas, the graphics, the music and the atmosphere. I haven't seen all of it yet and I've only done a handful of new quests, but what I've seen has been very good so far, well designed in true Turbine tradition.

The bugs are plentiful, some of them are quite annoying and I can understand how they might put some people off, but after some polishing and a few patches it'll all be fine. Yes, all of this should've been done before the release, the QA sucks etc., but those who love the game will get over it.

Nerfs don't bother me, as long as my characters are still fun to play, I'll adapt.

Tuesday, 26 June 2012

Expansion - important bugs, changes and what not to do

So as we all expected, the new expansion, despite the fact it looks like it's running more or less smoothly at first sight, is full of bugs and issues. In this thread I'll try to summarize the ones I think are important, to help people avoid some frustration and disappointment.

In general, I would advise that people hold off making significant changes to their characters, like respeccing, TRing etc. Turbine has a long history of breaking things that already worked fine. Personally I'm just going to run around in the new content and marvel at the new graphics for a couple days until they release one or two hot fixes that will address the most important issues.

So these are issues I want to point out. I'll expand the list as I discover new bugs :) Feel free to suggest stuff that you think should be added here, poke me in game or use the comments here:



Wednesday, 20 June 2012

A small update

Hi dudes,
As you've probably noticed, I haven't been online much, a consequence of a busy period at work combined with some nice weather combined with renewed interest in some of my other hobbies. I usually play less over the summer, which is probably going to be the case again this year, but I will keep popping in. If I remember correctly, the big expansion is coming out on Wednesday next week so I expect to spend more time online then to explore all the new shiny stuff (and all the new annoying bugs that are inevitably coming :p). EDIT: It's actually coming out today, the scheduled downtime is 11am to 4pm UK time, although where they manage that and whether the game's actually playable afterwards remains to be seen. The latest version of the release notes can be found here. For those who don't follow DDO news, here's a very brief list of what's new in the expansion:
  • New areas, quests and raids set in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting
  • Druid class
  • Epic levels and epic destinies, level cap increase to 25
  • Some significant changes to the combat and metamagic mechanics
It also seems that one of our longest serving members, Khyr, who's been on hiatus, is starting to play again a bit, which is great news. Welcome back, Khyr!

See you in game soon.

Mic :)

Tuesday, 8 May 2012

Build Your Guild

So today I actually took the time to read what the Build Your Guild event is all about - when Tangy leveled up and got us 70+ k renown, I was intrigued!
Apart from the renown bit, there's an XP bonus for grouping with guildies so I thought it might be time to do some leveling together again. Unfortunately we seem to be a bit scattered as for level ranges, I have a level 10 and level 16, Tangy is 12, not sure about others. Anyway, this is what I'm currently looking to do on my characters, give me a shout if you want to join me for these or any other XP runs:
Reckluse 10 - VON flagging on elite, level 8 Necro tombs on elite, possibly Threnal
Micron 16 - Fleshmaker elite, any other Orchard quests for sigil bits + Litany once I get full sigil, Crucible elite, other GH quests on any difficulty including Tor elite and normal with dragons, Siegebreaker series and others - not too picky.
EDIT: According to this, there's also a +25% XP bonus starting on the 10th of May. Apparently it's on until Sunday inclusive.

Monday, 7 May 2012

Challenges

Hi dudes,
As we have started running the challenges in House Cannith lately, I thought I'd throw in a couple useful DDO Wiki links. Turbine have apparently got into the habit of adding a new crafting line with almost every update and it's difficult to keep up. There is now Cannith crafting, Shroud crafting, Challenge crafting, Alchemical crafting, Stone of Change crafting, Epic crafting, Crystal Cove crafting and god knows what else, each with is own freaking ingredient types. They really try hard to make people spend some TP on ingredient bags. :p At least they make use of the barter box interface fairly often, which makes things a bit easier.

Anyway, if you want to craft challenge rewards, you need to run certain quests, each of which drops a different ingredient.
Basic info - an overview of the challenge rewards, what quests you need to run for which ingredients
Weapons - a more detailed overview of weapons that can be made with all levels and tiers and a listing of all available weapon types.
Ingredient trading - the ingredients can be exchanged for different ones at a 2:1 rate, so you could for example spend more time farming one easy challenge and subsequently trade the ingredients from it for a different type that drops in a harder challenge.