DDO: A whole new scene

I had it. I had had enough. The deafening silence of the Ghallandra server and the guild I found there finally got to me, and on the advice of DDOCentral, I used some of my points to transfer my character over to Cannith. I guess that’s the one that gets promoted the most right now for new players, so I hoped for a more involved and active population.

As an interesting aside, logging onto the Cannith server turned out to be fortuitous, since this was the server I used to play on back in 2008-10. I waved to my old Bard but forged forward with my Artificer. Sorry, Bardy, but your lack of a robot dog isn’t a compelling argument to get me to switch.

Within a half-hour, I already had a few leads on promising guilds. I joined up with [REDACTED], which initially looked like one of those guilds that invites anyone with a pulse (or grinding gears, in the case of the Warforged). And while that wasn’t untrue, the guild leader really impressed me by talking with me for a while before tossing me an invite — and then taking me and another new player on a tour of the guild’s airship afterward.

This was actually the first time I had ever been on a guild airship in the game. I vaguely remember their addition back in the day, but our Massively guild had only started to work on one when we all drifted apart.

I have to say, I was really impressed. This thing was HUGE, a flying fortress in the middle of the Instanced Ocean. It featured multiple floors and numerous amenities, including a teleporter, hireling vendors, a repair station, and a machine that spat out — and I am not exaggerating for comedic effect here — a string of 32 buffs for my character that lasted four-and-a-half hours. Almost felt like that was a cheat code I stumbled onto and made my current string of about six buffs look minuscule.

I’m going to try to be a little more social from here on out and see if guildies are up for runs, especially since there are several of us in the single-digits.

But for now, a few more House P quests, such as this one that had me blitzing through a crypt in the hopes of saving undead mummies from being filleted by Drow. Wait, *saving* the mummies? Yes indeed. An interesting twist, although I only learned afterward that I shouldn’t have brought along a hireling since they tend to target said mummies and actively work to fail the quest.

Let’s talk of hirelings for a few here. As I said previously, they’re nice to bring along — for the most part. It helps to have another fighting body in these dungeons, and if one is a healer? So much the better. But the hireling AI apparently works part-time, and apathetically part-time to boot. I never know if the hireling is going to actually participate in a fight or (as the picture above attests) just stand there in quiet amusement while I’m stabbed multiple times. You can use hirelings to remotely activate levers from across rooms, which is useful in missions designed for two or more players to work together, but it is very finnicky.

What’s probably most disappointing about hirelings is that they don’t seem to care about me at all. Not my feelings, I mean, but my physical health. If I die, the hireling AI doesn’t pick up my death stone and trot back to a shrine to rez me. That would be nice, but I guess it’s too much to ask.

This was another interesting quest in which trolls were being experimented upon and I had to free them just to kill them right afterward. I guess that makes me a mixed blessing from their perspective.

My kids REALLY liked this mission which featured Elf Scorpions. I have to admit, it isn’t something you see that often, even in fantasy MMOs, and I don’t want to think about the biological process that resulted in even one of these. I mean, if we wanted to make Elves any more loathsome and horrible, I guess it’s one way to go to give them a stinger, spider legs, and giant crab claws. Wonder how he combs his hair in the morning.