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

[RedSorc]

Playing DDO as Free-To-Play

DDO’s F2P offering is this strange mix between being incredibly generous and downright stingy. The game offers a package of free-to-play quests, then the rest of the game is locked behind the purchase of a large number of discrete “adventure packs” that you can purchase a la carte. It will feel very restrictive when you first pick up the game.

However, you earn a trickle of DDO points (the currency used in the shop) just by playing the game. Eventually, you reach a “critical mass” of unlocked content where you have enough to happily level up from level 1 to 20 on a reincarnated character. At this stage, you will enter a cycle where you roughly earn enough points to buy a new pack each time you do a 1-20 TR cycle, and you gradually unlock more and more of the game as you play it.

Once you’ve reached this critical mass, you’re pretty much now playing the game on a level playing field with everybody. There are some races and classes locked behind purchases, sure, and some of these are quite strong (particularly Warlock for a multi-boxer!), but you can fundamentally play the game as intended without any other painful restrictions that you might see in other games. No gold caps, no unequippable gear, no weird restrictions on forming parties or trading.

As such, whilst it is totally possible over the course of a long period of time to play the entire game for free, you might consider that your experience might be greatly enhanced making a few modest purchases at the beginning of your DDO career: I leave this in your hands. In this case, you might be well advised to pay for a single month of VIP subscription. If you play hard in that month, you can experience every non-expansion pack quest in the game and, in so doing, unlock a large number of rewards that you might otherwise have to pay for (e.g. the favored soul and artificer classes, 32-point character builds), as well as grabbing a large chunk of free DDO points from the quest completions. At the end of your month, you will have a large chunk of resources to invest in content you want, and knowledge of the content so that you understand which content you should be grabbing.

Without splashing the cash, there are a number of other tricks to playing the game as a F2P player.

• Wait for sales before spending DDO points. DDO usually has a large number of crazy good sales across the year. The best times are usually around about Christmas and during summer, where there are usually a few straight weeks of excellent sales one after the other. In some cases, these sales reduce the cost of adventure packs by 50-75%, and during last years round of sales the packs offered were extremely desirable packs that you absolutely want. It’s also worth mentioning that DDO also usually offers the expansion packs at a good discount in these time periods. If you can be patient, you can unlock really big chunks of the game very efficiently by waiting for these sales.

• Earn 100 favor on every server. You get a one time special reward each time you hit certain favor milestones on a particular server (see here). There’s one at 5, 25 and 50 favor, then you get your standard 25 DDO points when you hit 100 favor. If you do this once on every server, you earn 125 DDO points per server for a total of 1000 DDO points. As an example, during last years holiday sales, this was enough points to almost buy all of the heavily discounted packs, which pretty much gave you enough content to immediately hit critical mass.

• Older packs tend to be more cost efficient. Packs introduced after DDO made the shift to F2P tended to have a premium attached to them, and this premium has slowly inflated over the course of the years. This means that older packs tend to be significantly more cost efficient than newer ones. For example, Vale of Twilight is a piece of older content that costs 995 DDO points. Owning this one pack would be roughly equivalent (XP-wise) to owning Mines of Tethyamar and Soul Splitter, which would cost you 1375 points, and that’s without even considering that Vale also comes with a number of raids that you might want to try at some point.

• Collect your daily challenge token. A pair of NPCs in Eveningstar and House Cannith offer a free daily challenge token, which can be used to get access to one of the challenges in those locations. Grab these and stockpile them. Whilst the challenges aren’t particularly important parts of the levelling process, the Eveningstar ones are quite easy to 5-star, and can offer you big one-time lumps of XP that can be helpful breaking through a content drought, particularly in the last couple of heroic levels.

Generally speaking, here is a list of packs that you should probably have on your wish list:

• Necropolis, Part 2
• Vault of Night
• Demon Sands (slightly less valuable than the others in this list)
• Ruins of Gianthold (!)
• Vale of Twilight (!)
• Necropolis, Part 4
• Reaver’s Reach (note: these quests are VERY challenging to learn, but are your best bang for your buck if you can manage them)
• Three-Barrel Cove and Sentinels of Stormreach (less valuable than the others, but they form a saga when taken together than can be exceptionally helpful for pushing past tricky levels)

Here are some packs to avoid like the plague until you have nothing else to grab, as they are some of the least efficient XP in the game, or have undesirable level ranges:

• Against the Slave Lords
• The Temple of Elemental Evil
• Haunted Halls of Eveningstar
• Shadow Under Thunderholme
• Both Challenge packs
• Devils of Shavarath
• Keep on the Borderlands (massive new content premium!)
• The Lost Gatekeepers (massive new content premium!)
• The Sharn Syndicate
• The Seal of Shan-To-Kor
• The Catacombs (far more attractive when you intend to start pushing into epic levels)