Playing on Methadone

I told my guild that I was taking a break from raiding until the Burning Crusade. I "finished" playing the BC beta by leveling up my mage to 20. And I installed Dungeons & Dragons Online - Stormreach (DDO). If playing World of Warcraft is an addiction, then I'm on Methadone now. :)

Playing DDO is easy enough. Many things are similar to WoW or other MMORPGs. And at least the early game hasn't changed much since my first impressions of the beta test. And this game is definitely less addictive than World of Warcraft. In fact it feels more like a single-player game than like a MMORPG. One reason for that is that nobody is playing it. DDO has a total of five (5!!!) servers. I chose one at random, Aureon, and when I looked how many people were playing, there were only between 100 and 200 players online. So I looked at the official forums, and found a thread stating that another server, Lyrandar, was the most populated. I created a new character there, and found about 400 people playing on this server. Now I think these servers are international, and as European I'm automatically playing "off-peak", due to the time zone difference with the USA. But if at the time where I am playing all servers together just have about 1,000 concurrent users, even at peak times DDO can't have much more than 5,000 concurrent users. Compared to the 400 US and Euro servers of WoW, with over a million concurrent users at peak time, DDO feels really deserted.

But hey, I bought DDO when it came out, and still had the box shrink-wrapped in my games library. Better get some play value out of the money I spent for it. DDO is not a bad game, but it's main attraction for me right now is that it is "not WoW".

I need to get away from World of Warcraft before I burn out totally. I'd rather play something else now, and be eager again for the Burning Crusade expansion. Especially the level 60 raiding game is something that I had enough of. Yeah, I'm happy and proud to have seen BWL until Nefarian. But that took us two raids last weekend until Chromaggus was dead, for a total of 10 to 12 hours, waiting times included. The idea of doing that every weekend for the next couple of weeks before moving to the next raid dungeon filled me with dread and boredom. I don't know if that is different for other classes, but as priest healing and decursing in BWL plays pretty much the same as healing and decursing in Molten Core. Just the scenery is different. The fights are a bit harder, and the loot is better, but who needs tier 2 loot with BC just around the corner? The only change to that routine in sight was the next patch disabling decursive, and making dispelling magic a lot more hectic for priests. Not something I was looking forward to. Time to take a break.

That doesn't mean I cancelled my account for World of Warcraft. I might still check out the patch, maybe do a little of the "new" PvP (although I guess that the arenas will only be accessible in training mode, because the arena reward system is reserved for level 70 characters), or do some minor preparatory stuff for the expansion. Not sure whether I still want to play my level 63 priest in the BC beta. I just don't want to raid any more. I'll sure be back for the expansion, and that is less than 2 months away.

What I enjoy about DDO is that the playstyle is markedly different from World of Warcraft. Every quest is an instance, and there are a lot more scripted events, jump-climb-and-run parts, switches, puzzles, and the like. As I am still level 1 (there are only 12 levels in DDO, although each has 5 "rank" sub-levels), I didn't try grouping yet. I'll see how that goes a bit later. I choose a cleric for the same reason that I play a priest in WoW: figuring that it would be easier to get an invite. And in the D&D system priests are actually good at soloing, because they can wear heavy armor and heal themselves after the fight. I even got a "celestial dog" summoned pet.

The only trap is assuming that things are the same as in WoW when in fact they aren't. I had great difficulties with a quest where I had to dive through an underwater tunnel, running out of breath far too fast. I searched the potion vendor in vain for a water breathing potion or something. Until I finally looked in the manual and found that I could have breathed a lot longer under water if I had removed my plate armor and heavy shield. There is a certain logic to that, I just didn't think of it because what armor you wear doesn't make a difference to swimming and diving in WoW.

If you happen to play DDO and run into a cleric named Tobold on the Lyrandar server in the next couple of weeks, that's me. :)