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

[RedSorc]

Using Hirelings

Hirelings are NPC adventurers that can be hired by purchasing their contract from one of the hireling merchants. You can find such merchants in the Stormreach Marketplace.

Note: You cannot use hirelings in “Raid” adventures, so you will have to do without their help in conquering some of DDO’s greatest challenges.

Hirelings are generally treated with some disdain by the community at large. They are not particularly durable, they do not deal a great deal of damage and their AI can be very sluggish to respond to threats. Generally speaking, the only useful hirelings are the healer hirelings. These hirelings can offer characters without strong self-healing a method of sustaining themselves, and allow characters with strong self-healing the ability to conserve their SP between shrines.

However, hirelings can be very powerful if used correctly, and they are an excellent tool for multiboxers. A pair of cleric hirelings can offer much more consistent and reliable healing than one single hireling, and they offer considerable protection against wipes.

You are granted a new special action bar for the hirelings, and it is well worth keybinding some of these buttons in ISBoxer, particularly the “interact” button which will be used all the time, sometimes in stressful situations.

Here are some tips, tricks, and important tidbits of information about hirelings:

MOST IMPORTANT: Hirelings have lots of options to save you from a wipe. Hirelings have a couple of key ways in which they can help recover from a wipe without having to release. Generally speaking, if you are going into content you think might be dangerous, you can park one or both of your hirelings in a safe location by turning off follow. Let’s say you then die: you have a couple of options:

• Soulstone taxi. Whilst hirelings can’t generally pick up and use items, they CAN pick up soulstones when a character dies. To do this, simply target the soulstone you want the hireling to pick up, and spam click the Interact button (the cogs) until the hireling eventually obeys. Once you’ve done this, lead the hireling to the nearest shrine in order to resurrect yourself. If the hireling is being chased by creatures, mash the follow button on the hireling as much as you can, and the hireling will repeatedly teleport to you. This can help get the hireling “unstuck” from groups of enemies and, if the geometry favours you, it may even cause the hireling to lose aggro on the enemies if it ends up teleporting around a corner and they can no longer see them. Note: You can also do this trick with pets, such as a Pale Master Wizard’s skeleton knight!

• Stealthy Resurrections. Cleric hirelings that are level 9 or above all come with some sort of raise dead spell to rez you in a worst case scenario. These spells have long cast times, and the hireling ai can be painfully slow to get them cast on you, particularly if their first attempt doesn’t work for whatever reason.

• If you’ve parked your hireling somewhere far away from the fight and your team has wiped, here’s a general strategy for having them pull off a stealth rez. First of all, run away from the enemies that killed you as far as you can before you end up rubber banding back to your soulstone. You want to try and get around a corner or behind some sort of barrier. Next, before you rubber band, click the follow button on the hireling, then immediately put the hireling into wait mode, so it stops following you. This is critical, because if the hireling is actively following you when you rubber band then they will teleport with you to your soulstone, and will usually be torn apart by the pack of monsters that killed you.

• Now that your hireling is parked in a safe location not too far away, wait for you to rubber band, then run back. You then want to target yourself, then do the following: Put the hireling onto follow mode, press the raise dead/resurrection button, then put them back onto wait mode. This is because, for whatever reason, hirelings refuse to cast raise dead whilst they are on wait mode, even if you command them to. It is important you use follow mode and you do NOT use the follow button: If you hit the follow button, they will teleport to you, which will put all their abilities on a cooldown, so they won’t be able to rez you before your rubber band cooldown expires. By using the technique described, they should pull off the rez quickly, without moving out of their safe spot.

You generally want your healer hirelings on aggressive mode. Unless your hireling is on aggressive mode, the AI will not heal you unless you are in combat and you have been attacked. Whilst on aggressive mode, the healers will attempt to heal anyone they see who is missing hitpoints. In certain situations, you might be served by putting the hireling on passive and issuing orders to the hireling to heal your target directly if you really want to guarantee that the hireling actually gets their heal off. You could almost certainly make some useful ISBoxer keybinds to this effect.

Hirelings affect dungeon scaling, but not as much as another PC. Hirelings do affect dungeon scaling; so bringing a hireling into an adventure will slightly increase the power level of the enemies you find within the dungeon. The effect is quite small, so this should not dissuade you from using hirelings. Gold Seal hirelings contribute even less. Please note: If you are playing on Reaper difficulty, the dungeon is automatically scaled as if you have a full party, therefore hirelings do NOT affect scaling in this case. As such, there is no reason not to use hirelings in Reaper mode, even if you’re just taking them as insurance against a wipe.

Hirelings can be invaluable to help make content solo-able. Certain dungeons, particularly dungeons from the earlier times in DDO’s life, are intended to “require” a party in order to clear them. Examples include Tomb of the Shadow Lord and Rest for the Restless.

Hirelings benefit from bonuses to summoned creatures. For the purposes of abilities such as the Augment Summoning feat, Grand Summoner Magister passive or druid past life feats, hirelings are considered summons and gain full benefit. Generally, these abilities are not worth taking as they are not strong enough to make summons particularly useful. However, they do add quite a lot of potential durability onto hirelings and can boost their stats sky high in order to activate runes and levers with stat requirements. Crucially, these bonuses are applied when the hireling is summoned. This means that if you acquire an item that grants one of these abilities (such as the Kindred Pendant from Ravenloft), you only have to have that item equipped for when you summon your hireling at the start of the dungeon. You could set up an ISBoxer keybind to switch into this item as a part of your hireling summoning keybind.

Hirelings love temp hp. If your team has a strong source of temporary hitpoints (e.g. a Enlightened Spirit Warlock or a Warchanter Bard), it will help their survivability enormously.

Hirelings do not like traps. Hireling AI completely ignores traps. Whilst the game gives them a large resistance to trap damage to try and account for this, on higher difficulty modes most persistent traps will tear your fragile healer to shreds in seconds. Generally, if you know a trap is coming you want to command your hireling to be stationary and passive, then disable or move past the trap, then click the follow button to have the hireling teleport to your location, past the trap.