DDO: Dance like no one’s watching

Dungeons and Dragons Online has a lot of bizarre and situational spells, but perhaps the most amusing of all these is Otto’s Irresistable Dance. Like the name implies, it makes the subject stop what they’re doing and boogie down, complete with a disco ball and little notes flitting around. Even though a boss was doing this to me in the final moments of a very long dungeon, I didn’t mind. I’m that easily amused.

Anyway, more House J quests for me today as I began with the super-lengthy The Enemy Within. On one hand, it was a tedious slog through an unmemorable crypt that took around 40 minutes to complete. On the other hand, it was straight-forward and nothing I couldn’t handle, even with some dancing thrown in to the mix. Fighting some mind flayers at the end proved to be a bit of an interesting challenge, even.

Continuing with the “dead things are bad, kill them again” theme, I went into an oversized tower that a wizard lich decided to conjure up in a graveyard. I do appreciate how the lich used backlit Roman numerals to mark off each of his floors.

Actually, most of And the Dead Shall Rise is a well done mission that checks a lot of buttons for me in the way that the previous mission didn’t. The tower boasts an interesting design with some unique elements and it keeps changing things up from floor to floor.

In fact, one encounter made me laugh out loud when a whole bunch of random ghosts and spectres rushed me — and then a giant gelatinous cube launched itself out of nowhere to absolutely dominate the hallway. Like, where were you staying, pal? Are you visiting socially or is this your home? I have so, so many questions.

I wrapped up this jaunt through the Haunted Library, which might have been haunted but was a library in the same way that a parking garage is a garden. I missed seeing the last chest I needed for a quest reward and spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to backtrack — which included using a precious jumping potion to try to jump back up broken stairs (which did not work) and then exiting and reentering to see if there were rooms I hadn’t explored. Thank goodness for DDO Wiki, which provides fairly helpful maps in situations like this.