DDO: Life of a downtrodden kobold

Can I say that the group DDO nights have become one of the gaming highlights of the week for me? It’s something I genuinely look forward to each and every Tuesday, knowing that I’ll get to hang out with a group of fairly funny and knowledgeable gamers while we progress through this fascinating MMO. 12 years old, and DDO is still so unique for so many reasons in this space.

It was a little challenging for me to stay awake this past week, however. We’re in the throes of house cleaning and packing, and I slightly broke my body power-washing for an entire afternoon one day. By last Tuesday, I was plum exhausted and in need of a straight 12 or so hours of sleep. So that became a problem by about 10:00 p.m. during our gaming night, as my eyelids kept shutting and then jerking back up as I would frantically heal whoever was dying and try to stay with the group.

I only fell off of a platform once. Just once.

When you’re going through familiar low-level dungeons, the chatter tends to be less on strategy and more on weird observations. Like, who actually placed all of these rest shrines? Some ambitious deity? Who made the sewers of this city so big? And what is the life of a kobold like?

Speaking of kobolds, we did run Kobold Assault on Reaper 1. This proved to be one of the tougher healing challenges I’ve had to date. Everyone kept taking damage and there was no rest shrine as the waves kept coming. I did what I could, but I died at least twice and others did as well. Fortunately, we had a teammate help out with some spot-healing thanks to her wand. Victory was, in the final count, ours.

Nothing like running upstream against the current! Just don’t think about what you’re splashing through and you’ll be fine!

Our main goal last week was to get the whole group up to level 6. Since we’re trying to stay more or less exactly together in levels, this is important to catch stragglers up and not to take a level until we are all ready. By the end of the night we were, and I look forward to seeing my new spells. Group heal, please? Please?

I was hoping for some new gear, but other than a +healing trinket, I didn’t get any upgrades. I’ve been deeply hoping to get a pair of featherfall boots, because there is no piece of gear more useful in DDO than that to me. So far, no luck.

Running dungeons on Reaper can prove deadly in a heartbeat, with traps taking you out in a second and overpowered mobs suddenly springing out of nowhere. In this area, we had to retreat after losing one member to a couple of boss mobs and then whittle them down with attacks from above.

Nights above Eberron are still beautiful!

This was both bizarre and funny. We killed this boss ghost spider, and it left behind the above weird set of organs floating in mid-air. I don’t even know what those are supposed to be, but I felt like it was important to document them for posterity.

As a healer, I am very much not a fan of being crowd controlled during important fights. There was one mission where I was put to sleep (above) and blinded in short order. I generally try to hang back, but I’m not a coward either. At the very least I can swing a sword and let my pets get in and scrap things up a bit.