[Guide] Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) Multi-box Compendium

[RedSorc]

Tips and Tricks

Herein, I shall detail some of the little things that can offer you a little bit of an edge, or make your life coordinating this challenging multi-box a little bit easier. Note that there are couple of tricks for using hirelings you’ll probably want to be aware of as well: check the specific hireling section for that.

The Loading Screen Trick

This is exceptionally minor, but is a nice piece of quality of life if you know it. When you are in a loading screen, you are actually in the game and able to issue commands for the majority of it. In casual play, this is super helpful for telling the rest of your party when you are stuck on a loading screen, as you can happily press enter and type a message to the party.

In your multi-box, you can use this time to mash your summon hireling keybind in order to skip most of the casting time. This is only a small thing, saving you a couple of seconds each dungeon, but it definitely feels good not having to stand around waiting a bar to fill at the beginning of every single quest.

The 3-part 2-box

Even if you are just 2-boxing, if you have the patience, it can be helpful to maintain a third account. The most important thing your third account can manage is it can help you as an “opener”. Lots of conventional players have a second account for just this purpose: if somebody in your party has a quest, you can enter the quest, even if you wouldn’t be otherwise able to. You are also allowed to enter on any difficulty that the other party member has unlocked. This can be helpful to run elite/reaper quests on a first-life character without having to play through normal and hard.

In a small number of important situations, it can also be used to skip past undesirable pre-requisite quests to do the quest you want. The most famous quest for this is “The Shadow Crypt”; if you know how to run this quest, its literally the best XP/Hr of any quest at any stage of heroic levelling, but it usually requires you to complete 4 pre-requisite quests, one of which you want to avoid, and another of which you want to avoid like the plague. Having a “crypt opener” character means just having a character who’s flagged to start the Shadow Crypt, but never actually does it so that party members can do so.

In addition, there are a small number of quests, generally raids, that you cannot two-box, but you can three-box if the character turns up at just the right moment. The best example of this is The Vault Of Night, which can be 3-boxed if you have one, ideally two characters with pets, but is impossible to complete with a 2-box. VoN is a ludicrously big lump of XP and is a tonne of fun, so it can be helpful to have this option, particularly if you’re still building up your collection of adventure packs.

Window Farming

Let’s say you have a quest that gives awesome xp that you’d like to complete three or four times in a row to quickly farm up the last bit of a level. Cool! Problem is, maybe that quest has lengthy pre-requisites that need to be repeated each time you do it (e.g. Shadow Crypt), or the quest giver is miles away in a town such that running back and forth to pick up the quest again is time inefficient (e.g. Desecrated Temple of Vol). Fear not, there is a way to do it: window farming!

Here’s the trick: Finish the quest as normal. When you’re done, have one of your characters finish out, while the other one stays inside. Once the first character is out, click on the dungeon entrance again: the standard quest entry “window” will open up because the quest instance still exists, allowing you to rejoin your buddy on the inside. You have now “got the window”.

While the UI element is still open on the first character, finish out on the second. The moment that the second character leaves, the quest instance will be destroyed. However, the first character’s window will still be open. When the first character then clicks enter to “re-enter” the quest, it then instead creates a new instance of the quest, allowing you to complete it for XP again.

Note, by doing this for forfeit the quest reward for subsequent completions, but this is not a big deal.
This whole process might seem a little buggy/sketchy, but the practice is now a de facto part of the game that’s been exploited by almost everybody for over a decade. It used to be in the old days that if you put up an LFM saying you were window farming something, you’d get whispers saying “NO, DON’T PUT THAT IN AN LFM, THEY’LL FIND OUT!”. Nowadays, people just go “oh, cool, let’s go”.

Blocking Doorways

Unlike most MMOs, in DDO everything has a hitbox that blocks movement, with the sole exception that players can move through one another. This means that, unlike WoW or whatever, you can “body block” enemies to stop them getting into melee with your allies.

If you have a tanky character, this can be exploited by using doorways as bottlenecks. If you place a single character in the centre point of most doors in dungeons, there will not be enough room for melee enemies to sneak through, at which point your ranged character behind can safely fire away at the monsters in the room without fear of reprisal. This is a particularly useful trick against reapers, as they can often get choked by the flood of monsters trying to squeeze through the door, giving you a precious extra couple of seconds to bring down that Carnage Reaper before he gives you a bad day. Note: players don’t block other players, but monsters block other monsters!

Persistent AoE effects (such as web or firewall) can be particularly devastating in this situation. A web plus a tank in a doorway is basically an invulnerable castle in DDO terms, as all the immobile webbed up creatures are doing is taking up valuable space.

Be careful of ranged spellcasters in situations like this. In particular, enemy spellcasters can do enough damage or have enough cc to make standing in one location too dangerous. This goes double for Famine Reapers! Try to snipe them off quickly with your other character, if possible.

Dodging Ranged Attacks

In DDO, you sort of have two chances to dodge a ranged attack: first, you get your standard armour class/concealment/incorporeal check to see whether the roll of dice has resulted in a hit. Second, you also have the chance to just move out of the way of the incoming arrow so that there’s never even the opportunity. Projectiles are not just visual things: they have to actually hit your character’s hitbox in order to have an effect.
You can manipulate the enemy AI to dodge such attacks by strafing from side to side repeatedly while enemies are firing missile weapons at you. Enemies do not try to fire projectiles directly at you: they try to judge where you are going to be when the projectile arrives. However, the only thing they use is your current velocity when trying to determine this. As such, if you repeatedly strafe from side to side, the enemies will dramatically overshoot their shots to the left or right of you, and you can avoid most damage from ranged attacks.
This trick works for any one using a missile weapon or ray spell (such as those used by most hobgoblin spellcasters). It becomes more effective the further you are away: if you are in an outdoors area, sniping enemies at maximum range, you can even dodge fireballs from fire elementals in this fashion.


The Magic Backpeddle

Here’s the melee version of the previous trick: unlike ranged attackers, melee attackers will attempt to attack where you actually are at the start of their attack animation. The critical point there is they target you at the START of the animation: due to the fraction of a second of latency you get, and the time taken for the animation to resolve, you can actually dodge melee attacks if you are careful enough.

The easiest way to do this is to backpeddle in a circle. If you do this correctly, the majority of melee attacks incoming will be aimed just to the side of you. This is particularly effective if you have a short range AoE attack to spam as you move in a circle: warlocks using a cone-shaped eldritch blast are outrageously powerful using this technique.

This is harder to pull off in a multi-box, but in a panic situation, any sort of backpeddling will help keep a character alive against melee attackers.