Beauty, as they say, is often in the eye of the beholder.

Thankfully Beauty carries a big axe, so she should be able to cut her way out again.

Dwarf Barbarian/Bard. Sing loudly, and carry a big axe.

Now we just have to see how long it takes before the re-roll.

1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

1:28 And yay did God visit the forums to see if his creation was good. But lo did the forums say ‘No, God’ and ‘God no!’, and they did explain unto God why only a newb would create man in a such a way. And the forums did then show God how to create a man who would have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

1:29 Then God became confused. For though one post on the forums did say ‘Create unto ye a man in this fashion, and your man shall be the greatest upon the earth’ verily did another spring forth which declaimed the first and spoke unto God ‘nay, create man in this way or let him forever crawl upon his belly and suck dust for all the days of his life’.

1:30 And God did consider bringing floodwaters on the forums to destroy all life under the various topics and every creature that has the breath of life in it. But quickly did God realise that there were no living creatures on the forums, only phosphorous manifestations of vitriol and invective.

1:31 So God destroyed man and made him again. And again. And again. Until eventually God thought ‘sod it’ and hit the random button and hoped for the best.

1:32 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, he wasn’t sure about it any of it any more.

2:1 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he went and twiddled with Jupiter for a bit, because it was without form, and void, and he could play around with it without suffering the truculent criticism and dissent of alternating prepossessions.

And so, some six or seven thousand years hence, man is still a complete and utter shambles today, even after the great re-roll around Genesis 6:9.

In other news, I spent a few hours on the DDO forums last night trying to determine a sensible build for a new character, because stat choice can have a large impact on the viability of a character and is largely set in stone once the character is created. After searching around for absolutely ages, I concluded that there definitely wasn’t a Flood Forum button anywhere to be found. So I picked a path which looked about right (and which the forums will tell you is tantamount to deciding to eat the serviettes at a Michelin-starred restaurant rather than anything from the menu), and got on with trying to play the game under the pressure of several fathoms of guilt and inadequacy which had built up over the course of my browsing.

After such an evening of reading the forums, I can’t help but expect that I’ll login with a new character one day only to be confronted by a huge ‘NO! WRONG!’ sign, whereupon I find myself summarily ejected from the game, my account deleted, and the game in the process of uninstalling itself from my hard disk drive.

I really wouldn’t mind an MMO where I could customise a character’s abilities based upon the alien concept of them sounding fun, while still being able to fulfil a role within the game. Or, if ‘learning to play (in a very specific way determined outside of the game by spreadsheets and data mining)’ is still to be a requirement, then perhaps it would be sensible to postpone those decisions which require learning until after I’ve had a chance to play.

I say!

Be warned, though! Such dapper head adornments can lead to spontaneous terpsichorean outbreaks:

Check me out! I'm dancing, I'm dancing!

Of course the entire guild promptly donned toppers for perhaps the most stylish ever dungeon delve (our photographer apologises for not catching the entire guild in a shot, and for forgetting to turn the game interface off leading to the somewhat unfortunate beheading)

We're here to kick ass and look incredibly stylish, though we didn't bring enough healers to completely kick ass

The puzzle in question, and I do want to emphasise again that I use puzzle in the same way that I would still call a two piece jigsaw puzzle a puzzle, is found in the depths of the Tangleroot Gorge quest line concerning the Splinterskull orcs, specifically starting with the quest Agent of the Darguul which is activated once you’ve obtained access to the inner stronghold of the Splinterskull fortress. Upon entering the inner sanctum and having killed a few orcs guarding the entrance, the player is presented with a raised drawbridge spanning a chasm which appears to be infinitely deep and is bounded, as only D&D chasms can be, by sheer walls of rock at either end. The immediate message is ‘the bridge is the only way across’. Now if this were a pen and paper game, say, then the players would be able to come up with all manner of crazy strategies to ruin the DM’s carefully planned puzzle, they would form a human ladder; one of the more engineering minded types would build a hang glider; the tomb raider types would lasso their way across; the mage would cast one of Levitate Party, Chasm-Spanning Phantasmal Bridge of Convenient Expedience, or Polycell’s Quick-Drying Chasm Filler; and the dwarf Barbarian would just move his character on to the next part of the map with an angry mutter about how he hadn’t munchkined this character into an orc threshing machine to spend his time dallying around with stupid bridges that had developed far too great a sense of their own self worth.

In DDO the characters are limited to one option, which is: what the developer intended. As such, a brief examination of the situation reveals a lever on the other side of the chasm that the players need to hit to lower the bridge. Well, it’s not so much a lever as a giant flat board with a target painted on it on top of a stick, the sort of thing you see at funfairs attached to a chair suspended above a pool of water which tips up and dunks some poor fellow when it’s hit with a projectile of some sort. To its credit the DDO version isn’t surrounded by flashing neon with a big arrow suspended from the ceiling pointing down at it, but it’s pretty obvious after the most cursory of inspections, and it wouldn’t be entirely out of place for it to have an orc in a top hat and cane standing beside it shouting “Roll up, roll up! Hit the lever, win a prize! How about you sir? You look handy with a projectile weapon, fancy trying to lower the draw bridge for your lady friend there? No sir, that’s not a euphemism! Roll up! Roll up!”

Of course the designer, being a conscientious type, was concerned that there was an outside chance of a player turning up without a projectile weapon of any sort. It could happen, especially if they were a purely melee class and running the dungeon solo, although nowadays I imagine most players are veteran enough to realise that even if you have -20 to all projectile weapon proficiency rolls it’s still worth taking some sort of ranged weapon with you, just in case you stumble upon the side of a barn that needs hitting from a distance, say. Or a big painted target on the other side of a chasm. It might take a few attempts, with the first few probably ending up with you embedding sharp projectiles into the buttocks of any fellow adventurers who didn’t have the common sense to leave the instance and wait for you to finish before coming back in, but eventually you’ll twang something across the chasm that bounces off three walls, catches an orc a glancing blow to the back of the head and then flops against the lever as it falls to the floor. So what was the solution to the problem of a player turning up without a projectile weapon to their name (other than perhaps that weapon which one doesn’t whip out in public and try to shoot across chasms as it’s considered bad form and rather unhygienic)? I think the designer might have got a little bored at this point, because directly opposite the lever, on your side of the chasm, is a modest looking crate. Inside which is a bow and a set of arrows.

I can imagine some of the party conversations that have taken place at that bridge:

“Damn, the bridge is up and there’s no other way across this conveniently inconvenient chasm!”

“There’s a lever on the other side!”

“Are you sure? It’s not a torch holder or weapon rack or something?”

“No, quite sure. There’s a big orc over there in a top hat shouting about it. And the neon sign saying ‘Hit here to lower bridge’ is a bit of a giveaway too.”

“Well that’s no use, I don’t have any projectile weapons with me. Do you?”

“No. Well, yes…”

<zip>

“Argghhhh, put it away! I told you before! Remember? At the Queen’s ball…”

<zip>

“Sorry. Ok… Ok! I have a plan! I could use my tumble skill to roll up to the edge of the bridge on this side of the chasm and then throw a loop of rope over to the pillar on the other part of the bridge. Now, the rope isn’t long enough to reach all the way, so I’ll use my jump skill to leap out to the rope and the momentum of my swing as I hit it should carry me most of the way to the other side. Then, when I reach the zenith of my swing I’ll let go, at which point you can cast Harold’s Handy Hand of Helping to give me a push which should allow me to reach the chasm wall on the other side. Then I’ll use my climbing skill and my +4 Claws of Chasm Climbing to scale the wall, leap over the top, kill the orc in the top hat, and then bypass the lever mechanism with my disable device skill!”

“Or we could just use the bow and arrows in this crate here.”

“Bu…”

“Your idea was splendid. Really it was. We’ll do that next time, eh?”

“*sigh* I suppose so. Do you even know how to use that bow?”

“Oh yes, it’s quite simple really. You just slot the arrow here, like so. Then you pull back li…”

<*twang*>

“Arrrgh! Oh God, my buttocks!”

“Oh my. Terribly sorry! Let’s try that again.”

<*twang*>

“Owwww! Ah ha heee, ooooo, ow.”

“Oh dear. One more go…”

<Sixteen arrows later>

“A hit! A most palpable hit! And the bridge is down. Come on my friend, let us continue on… are… are you ok?”

“I’ll… be fine. Just… need… to run…. bent over. And… mustn’t sit down.”

“Y’know, with your diminutive halfling size, a little tin foil and some chunks of pineapple and cheese, we could hire you out as a delightful presentation piece at parties…”

“Am… hffff…. going to stab you with… hssss… an arrow. Just as soon… ahhhnggg… as I find a doctor with good strong grip and some… ooohoohooo…. pliers.”

Next week: World of Warcraft’s incredible grind to get the key for Karazhan when it was first released, and the curious question as to why no player ever found the spare key hidden under the mat outside the front door.

Anyway. Much of the attraction of the Total War series is the way it combines two genres: the strategic turn-based campaign, where you build and govern your empire, and the tactical real-time battles that result when you send your armies into combat and trample the enemy with elephants. (If you’re playing as the Carthaginians in Rome: Total War, at least. Not so many elephant-based units in 19th century Europe. Unless the next Total War game covers the 1870 siege of Paris and you get to take the zoo animals into battle rather than just eating them.) You can skip either aspect if you really want, though; the games come with selections of historical battles and skirmish modes to leap straight into the real-time battles side of things, or if you’re more of a political leader and don’t want to get your hands dirty on the campaign map you can leave it to your AI generals and have the computer automatically resolve fights.

Over in Dungeons & Dragons Online I’ve gained a couple of ranks and therefore have some Action Points to spend, and poring over the range of enhancements available it struck me that, as with Total War, there are two quite distinct parts to the game: planning and building your character, and adventuring with them. Most MMOGs have the two elements, but the dichotomy in Dungeons & Dragons Online is particularly pronounced.

Combat in DDO is, for an MMOG, fast paced; when attacking you hit what’s in the cross-hairs in the middle of the screen, not necessarily a target selected by clicking or hitting Tab (there’s no friendly fire, thankfully, or 97.4% of adventures would end in bitter acrimony after the first encounter. Or possibly before, if somebody went to buff another player but forgot that left clicking triggers an attack rather than selecting a target.) Magic users will probably have a hotbar or seven filled up with different spells to cast, but melee characters tend not to have many abilities to activate in a fight compared to other games; my regular in-combat clickable abilities (as opposed to buffs, toggles etc.) are outnumbered by the sack full of different weapon sets I cart around for various encounters.

Where DDO’s combat is streamlined, the character planning side of things has many strange knobbly bits sticking out and causing turbulence. DDO’s rules are derived from a pencil and paper game: the Generic Universal RolePlaying System. No, wait, not that one, Dungeons and Dragons. The clue was in the title, in hindsight. With MMOGs being more combat focused than pencil and paper games the rules are quite heavily modified, but creating a character is still a rather involved business. In WoW, WAR or LotRO after picking a race and a class your toughest decisions generally involve beard style and colouring, in DDO you’ve got stats, skills and feats to worry about. As you ascend ranks and levels the choices open up further still, as DDO allows you to combine classes. I think this is almost, if not entirely, unique for a class-based MMOG, and as the saying goes “you haven’t seen hybrids until you’ve seen a Wizard/Rogue/Cleric and Paladin/Sorcerer/Bard duo in DDO”. It can be a bit daunting trying to choose from a list of 50 feats when you have a nodding acquaintance with the pencil and paper rules, let alone if you’re coming to it fresh.

Like Total War, though, you can, to a greater or lesser extent, skip either facet of the game if you really want. Recognising the complexity of character building, Turbine added Paths that your character can follow, so you just need to decide whether your fighter wants to focus on dealing damage, tanking or whatever, and the game sorts out the rest for you. It won’t give you the most ludicrously optimised min-maxing munchkin build possible, but at least you won’t end up with totally inappropriate stats. If it’s the character planning side of things that’s more interesting to you, there isn’t exactly an option to build an adventurer and hit an “Automatically Resolve” button instead of battling through a dungeon to gain loot and XP, but there is an out-of-game ecosystems of forums, spreadsheets and standalone character planning tools to tinker about with theoretical builds. Again like Total War, I think the game is at its best when you at least dabble in both sides, so time to check when the next rank of Tempest opens up and make sure I’m meeting the pre-requisites for it.

I think the hectic feeling comes from two things, which both DDO and AoC share: no auto attack swings, and a dependence on character positioning to maximise outgoing damage while decreasing incoming damage – when considering combat from a melee point of view, at least. The fact that there are no auto attacks gives a sense of urgency to the player’s actions, this is less pronounced in DDO where one can just keep their finger held down on the attack button, but in Age of Conan if the player isn’t pressing buttons then their character isn’t attacking, and so wandering off to read your RSS feed while your character auto-defeats a mob, possibly with something pinning down the numeric key of your biggest attack or self-heal such that it triggers every time it comes off of its cool-down, is not an option. I think this is what I like about AoC’s system: it’s designed to keep the player invested in the fight; you rarely find your mind wandering on to other subjects. I think it’s a testament to this that among the media-promoted adolescent male gamer population that plays these sort of games, I’ve yet to see anyone running around with a topless female character. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there are jiggles of topless females (Oh really? Well you define the collective noun for topless females then) running around in certain areas of the game, treeless open expanses of Serengeti-like grassland, where they bask in the sun and hunt around in packs for unsuspecting prey to devour, while men with cameras venture out on safari and try to capture pictures of them. On Earth we call this place Ibiza. But, at the lower levels at least, I haven’t seen a single one, and I think that this is down to the fact that they are so involved with the combat system that they simply don’t have time to sit, chin in cupped hand, while they press the number 2 button every fifteen to twenty seconds, and wonder whether there’d be more to that side-boob if they unequipped their character’s chest piece.

The second system that keeps a player invested in the combat is the combo system, which is, in a way, a bit like an inverted gambit system as used by the Warden class in LotRO, with AoC’s version being somewhat easier to cope with, which may be a good or a bad thing, depending on your point of view and capacity for memorisation. Where a player of a Warden has to remember a string of sub-moves that will produce a resulting gambit move, Age of Conan provides a number of final moves that the player activates by pressing a button on their hotbar, at which point a UI element pops up informing the player of the sequence of sub-moves that must be performed to achieve the desired final move that they activated in the first place. I like this system, and although I think there is fun and satisfaction to be had from remembering all the various moves in LotRO’s system for the Warden, there’s nothing in AoC’s system that prevents a player from memorising the moves required and thus executing them quicker than someone who has to study the display – a big advantage in a game where combat is a lot less static than more traditional MMOs such as WoW and LotRO – but at the same time the memorisationally challenged such as myself (just ask Zoso: it’s a miracle if I remember to finish a sentence half the time) are not prevented from joining in with the complexities of combat straight from the off, albeit at a slight disadvantage to those with a richer capacity for recall.

The final function that helps to keep each combat exciting and fresh is the dependence on positioning to maximise your damage while minimising that of the enemy, a system which is shared to some extent, as I mentioned earlier, with DDO. It makes for quite a comical experience when you first play such a game, though, especially if you’ve been used to the more traditional ‘stand toe-to-toe and hit each other in turns over the head until one of you collapses’ fight, which sounds as though it would be equally at home at a college fraternity initiation rite, and thus may well explain the popularity of traditional MMOs among that section of the student population. There’s a point when the full comedy (or tragedy, depending on your point of view) of the situation for someone new to this style of combat hits home: generally there’s a point where you’ve got the fingers of your left hand on the movement keys to keep you facing in such a way as to maximise the area of effect of your glancing blows; your right hand is frantically mashing left, right and side buttons while holding on to the mouse for dear life as it flies around the mat like a cat that’s just sat on a hill of fire ants; your nose is pressed across the attack buttons on the keyboard that your left hand can’t quite reach while you desperately tongue the key that you’ve bound to health potions; and it’s usually at the point where you shout profane curses to your deity of choice for not giving you eyelids with enough musculature to be able to depress the F keys that are sitting tantalisingly beneath your eyes that you realise you might not have quite got to grips with this new combat system yet.

The great feature of this more fluid and dynamic flow of combat is that it adds another level of tactical decision making to the fight: as well as picking the right ability based on health bars, number and power level of combatants, and such, you also need to consider how to best position yourself to deal maximum damage while at the same time taking as little as possible, which in turn feeds back into the decision making process as to which ability you might want to use. Sure, fundamentally it’s still MMO combat, so Sun Tzu need hardly plan his undead comeback tour, but it definitely keeps the player more focussed on the task at hand, rather than flicking over to YouTube to watch a video of someone else performing the same fight but in their underwear. No, it isn’t the player’s character in their underwear.

AoC differs from DDO slightly in the fact that, where DDO just needs you to keep the left mouse button held down for your character to begin flailing away, AoC uses the 1, 2 and 3 keys to perform a basic ‘white damage’ swing to the left, centre or right of the target respectively, and while I admire the additional idea of trying to get characters to target a specific location on an enemy it does lead to slightly jarring combat animations where you mash one key in between performing a special move until the enemy switches their shield to that area, at which point you spam away at a different location, it ends up making your character look like a slightly over-exuberant dance or exercise instructor “And lunge. And lunge. And lunge. And lunge. And lunge. And parry. And thrust. And hack their arm off at the shoulder. And relax.” The animations don’t flow entirely naturally when you’re executing them so quickly in succession either, such as when you’re just going for white damage spam (note to search engines – not a bukkake reference) to finish off an enemy, and so it can lead to a little bit of a disconnect at that point, but it’s more comedic in nature than anything.

Where AoC differs greatly from DDO and is more akin to LotRO is in the slowness of combat. When I say slowness I’m talking not about the speed with which you perform actions in combat, but the average amount of time combat takes. I think here AoC marches more in step with the traditional toe-to-toe-head-beating frat party MMOs, where you have time during combat to think about things, to make mistakes and correct for them and to generally get a sense of the thing before it is all over. In DDO you can one-shot and be one-shot, or if not then very close to such, on quite a regular basis. So where AoC keeps the player on their toes by having them make lots of decisions quickly throughout the duration of a long combat, DDO makes players think quickly because otherwise they will either be dead, or the mob they are trying to attack will have been killed so hard that they travelled back in space and time and became their own father.

I think AoC’s combat is a step in the right direction, but they perhaps went a little overboard on the ideas front without perhaps considering the limitations of the human beings who will be trying to perform seventy five different actions at once, whilst at the same time coordinating their efforts with five other players who are all trying to do the same. MMOs are well known for their extensive keyboard layouts for all the various functions of the game, and I’m sure it’s partly to blame for why we haven’t seen many successful MMOs on the console yet:

“Everyone, this is Geoff. Geoff’s job is going to be to fit aaaaaallllll the functionality of our MMO’s UI keybinds onto a controller with six buttons and no alphanumeric input whatsoever.”

<Raucous laughter>

<Geoff sneaks off while nobody is looking, never to return>

and I worry that by extending this theme of “if you design it, they will bind it” to fast-paced combat we’re heading towards a place where N52s will become a requirement for entry into some areas of the MMO genre. The funny thing is, similarities aside, LotRO’s version of the combo combat system is actually perfectly suited to a gamepad, as unwize rightly pointed out a while back in response to my previous thoughts on the gambit system.

In the meantime, however, it’s back to my combaterobics.

“And one. And two. And lift. And stretch. And dismember. And teabag. And rest.”

The Monk in DDO is an interesting class, I’ve spoken before about how the mechanics for the class are in some ways similar to those of the Warden in Lord of the Rings Online, and that, due to the hectic pace of the combat in DDO and the standard MMO UI, the class doesn’t quite hit the level of harmony that its Middle Earthian compatriot enjoys. It is strange, but for a class that is all about harmonious balance and oneness, the Monk as a class always seems slightly at odds with the rest of the game.

To start with, the Monk relies on Ki to power its special moves and its special special move, or finishing move to properly name it, and although the Monk can store some Ki in between fights, at the lower levels at least, it never seems to be enough. The combat in DDO is so fast paced and frantic that by the time the Monk has built enough Ki to activate three of their special attacks and thus open up the option of the special special ability, the fight is over and the Monk is left with a useful buff or heal that is all ready to go but for a lack of Ki to power it, which is deeply frustrating in itself and doubly so when combined with another element of the class that appears to be there purely to rankle the player.

First a little pondering on front-loaded versus slow-burn abilities. It’s an element of many MMOs: the Mage with their pool of spell points all ready and waiting to be used versus the Warrior or Rogue type who has to build up rage/fervour/combo points/Ki in order to activate their more damaging abilities. It was a frustration for me in LotRO with my Champion and, having played a Runekeeper for a while, was part of the reason that I decided to drop the class and change to something else. For me it’s more fun and of greater utility to be able to let rip with a number of abilities right from the beginning of a fight than have to wait for what seems like an eternity while being wailed on by a bunch of angry pixelated script routines. It also seems that, in a very general case, if you have to wait a while to build-up enough smite juice to perform your class’s abilities, it would probably be fair for those abilities to be of greater power than those of a class that can use them freely right from the onset of conflict; rarely do I see classes of the slow-burn sort with abilities that outstrip the front-loaded abilities of those classes with a fixed pool of power, often they’re lucky if the two are even on a par. Ah, but the classes with a fixed pool have a finite resource, whereas those classes that build-up their power over time technically have a limitless supply! Which is a fair point, but how often do we see concessions to front-loaded classes in an MMO, such that they’re given ways to refill their sapphire scrotums with spell sperm? And how often do fights in an MMO last long enough that these classes are in danger of blowing their load and thus risk standing limp and spent at the back of the battle? Raiding is generally where it balances out, but if you’re not a raider and just enjoy small group dungeons and questing with your friends, it’s hard not to be frustrated by the fellow who can remove two thirds of a mob’s health bar before you’ve had enough time to whip out your weapon, let alone fluff it up enough that you can get some decent penetration with it.

As well as being a slow-burn class in a game where fights are fast and frantic – DDO combat is to WoW as a Vin Diesel film about chess would be to a documentary about Kasparov versus Deep Blue, at least I’m pretty sure Kasparov never played the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit whilst hanging from the bonnet of a speeding car and firing a 9mm at his opponent – the Monk also has a curious phobia of interacting with objects. It’s not a phobia as such, but in my mind that’s how it would appear to others, because if a Monk has their special special move ready to use and they interact with any object before they’ve activated said special special move, the ‘charge’ of the move is removed, or wasted as some might look at it. There’s nothing more frustrating than being in a dungeon and having a much needed healing special special move all lined up, needing one or two Ki more in order to be able to use it, and finding yourself standing at the base of a ladder. Doors also become an enemy to revile, loot chests become bittersweet rewards, levers and switches are spiteful and venomous, anything, anything that requires you to interact with it is anathema. Playing in a group becomes positively embarrassing:

Fighter: “So we’re all set, the Rogue will stealth in to the room right after the Monk opens the door”

Monk: “NO!”

Fighter: “What’s wrong?!”

Monk: “I CAN’T TOUCH THE DOOR!”

Fighter: “Why? OMG, TRAP? Rogue, why didn’t you spot the trap?!”

Rogue: “There isn’t a trap!”

Monk: “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND. IF I TOUCH THE DOOR I WILL DISCHARGE!”

Fighter: “Dischar…? Dude, that’s sick!”

Rogue: “What’s up? What did he say?”

Fighter: “Dude said he was going to ejaculate if he touched the door.”

Rogue: “Ewww, god, what sort of sick fu…”

Monk: “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong. My power will discharge. Yes? I will go karmically limp. My ability to buff you all will be removed until I furiously pound some more kobolds and regenerate my energy.”

Fighter: “Oh god, I think I’m gonna hurl”

Rogue: “What? What did he say now?”

Fighter: “He says he wants to get jiggy with some kobolds so that he can get up the energy to rub our co…”

Rogue: “ALRIGHT. Enough. I’ll open the damn door, sheesh. You could have just ASKED.”

Monk: “Nobody understands me. Let me place my quivering palm on you and buff your co…”

<Fighter has left the party>
<Rogue has left the party>

Monk: “…nstitution. Your constitution. Hello?”

Seriously, I’ve stood at a door having the “I can’t touch the door otherwise I’ll lose my special special power” conversation with my group, and I’m pretty sure it only served to further cement in their minds the impression that I am quite, quite mad. And possibly a pervert.

I’ve no idea why the Monk’s special special ability would need to be discharged like that, maybe there’s a facet of the game that I’m not understanding, but I can’t think of many exploits that would be possible by charging up a special move and having it remain until the Monk next needed it, especially seeing as many of the Monk’s special special moves are simple one-minute duration party buffs, hardly an overpowered thing to have ready at the start of a fight.

Which leads me onto the other curious disharmony of the Monk’s mechanics, the fact that most of their special special moves are one-minute duration party buffs. Most fights as part of a competent party last all of fifteen seconds and, if the Monk is lucky, will provide just enough Ki to power one special special move. Now, the time it takes for the party to find the next group of mobs can be much more than a minute, especially if they’re taking things slowly and not trying the Indiana Jones style of trap avoidance by running pell-mell through the dungeon with their eyes closed while holding on to their hats. So the Monk doesn’t want to fire-off the buff at the end of combat because it is highly likely that it will have expired before the next combat begins. So they hold on to it. Why waste it, they think, I’ll just hold on to it until the next fight. I’ll have it ready for the start of the fight and we’ll all have a nice little buff to get us through it. I’ve worked hard for this buff, it took me time and coordination to build up the combination required to activate it while I was in the middle of that hectic fight. Yes, I will hold on to it and use it later, and the group will be most pleased!

And the Monk, cheered by their sensible approach to the situation, breaks out of their personal reverie and rejoins the conversation just at the point when the Fighter says:

“So we’re all set, the Rogue will stealth in to the room right after the Monk opens the door”

“NO!”

I’ll start again.

The major observable similarity between Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online is that they both have dwarves. And rubbish beard options.

I play a Monk in DDO, and the primary mechanic of the class is a combo system that is very similar to that of the Warden in LotRO, where the player has a number of abilities to choose from that will perform combat manoeuvres, and at the same time the order in which these abilities are performed will also activate a more powerful ‘finishing’ manoeuvre. The Monk has a limited set of finishing manoeuvres compared to the Warden, and where the Warden has numerous effects both personal and group wide, the majority of the Monk’s finishers consist of one minute duration group buffs or targeted debuffs. The interesting difference, however, is the pace at which combat takes place in each game, and I think that it’s because of this that the Warden works as a class where the Monk feels a lot more awkward and, to some extent, frustrating to play.

I use pace to describe the difference in the combat between the two games, but it’s not really the whole story, although DDO definitely feels faster, with mobs dropping quickly – sometimes going down in one almighty burst of a critical attack roll – the flow of the game is also more dynamic, with caster mobs dropping back out of melee range to cast, melee mobs running past the melee front line to get to the PC casters, the combat feels more… fluid.

I was stunned and somewhat frustrated in LotRO the first time I entered the Barrow Downs in a group, coming fresh faced and level capped from World of Warcraft I was used to the power of predictable and consistent aggro generation that the tanks in that MMO provided; compared to WoW, LotRO at that time was a different world entirely. WoW’s tanks were giant electromagnets, so powerful that they could draw mobs to them from half way across the dungeon and hold them there indefinitely, and as long as an enemy caster had a few buttons on their robe that were made out of metal, they too would be drawn inexorably in. So a WoW instance run generally consisted of a giant ball bristling with angry and somewhat compacted mobs, around which several melee PCs would stab periodically while the ranged types stood back and lobbed spells at it. After a minute or so of this regimented attack formation a tank would appear from out of the resultant debris, brush off a few extraneous bits of metal that were still stuck to their armour, then trundle their way into the next pack of mobs until they looked like a hamster in a rollerball made from orcs, before rolling back and bumping to a halt on the skirting board of melee DPS. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that tanking was easy in WoW but, given an accomplished player, the level of control afforded tanks in WoW was an order of magnitude greater than that of LotRO, where every care had to be taken by the DPS not to over-nuke and for the healer to carefully balance their healing output in order not to draw aggro. Even so, mobs in LotRO would run around a fair bit compared to WoW, and most fights were hectic; picture the resultant chaos from releasing a couple of agitated bats into your average teenage girls’ midnight slumber party and sealing the doors, and you have an idea of the high-pitched screaming flailing combat that occurred.

Now take that same scenario and replace the bats with a pack of terminally-rabid Fox Terriers, and you have combat in DDO.

As such you can’t rely on standing still for a moment in DDO and just punching the abilities on your hotbar, you need to be on the go all the time. There is also no auto-attack, you either have to constantly mash, or simply hold down, the left mouse button to attack, and this ‘basic’ attack in DDO constitutes the majority of damage for most classes. For those of us with only two hands, this makes hotbar activation a little trickier. Even with my key-binds set up to place the abilities I need within easy reach of my ESDF-movement hand, it’s somewhat tricky to be on the move almost non-stop and at the same time activate other abilities. I may have to look into making more use of my extra mouse buttons perhaps, but even so there’s also another limiting factor which causes a clash in combat, an area where I feel a lot of MMO developers fail to innovate when they have evolved some core part of the MMO design – the UI.

DDO sticks to the traditional ‘hotbars with cool downs’ UI design, where ability icons are greyed-out if they can’t be used, be it because they are on cool-down, the target is out of range for the ability, the PC doesn’t have enough spellpower/endurance/ki to activate the ability, or any number of other reasons. The problem I find is that, given that the combat in DDO has been changed from the traditional electromagnetic-hamster-rollerball of WoW to a more rabid-Fox-Terrier-in-a-room-full-of-hysterical-teenagers design, it seems that the traditional UI design of WoW, with its hotbars and party frames and various elements that require your concentration to be away from your character for split seconds at a time, should have been eschewed for a more Head-Up Display sort of design.

Being that my primary area of work is the software for Head-Up Displays of various types, I can quite happily relate to the need for information to be available at all times in an unobtrusive manner, so that split-second decisions can be made without having to rely on the human body’s ponderously slow response to changing focus between various display items. I’m not saying the timing requirements in DDO are nearly so stringent or critical as those we have to deal with in aviation, but at the same time it seems obvious that in a game where a mob can have moved out of attack range in the time it takes you to check to see if an ability is off of cool-down, the need for a change in the fundamental philosophy behind the UI and why it exists is evident. This problem is exacerbated when playing the Monk because they have numerous moves, all with independent cool-downs, the order of activation for which is important to get a valid combination to trigger a finishing move, and on top of which they have to have generated enough Ki to power each of these moves. That’s a lot of looking at hotbars and not looking at your character.

An instant solution to the problem would be to drag the hotbars up towards my character on the screen so that they are always within my field of view, but who wants to play a game through a viewport of hotbars and party frames? Well, some people it seems: just look at the many raid UIs in evidence on various WoW AddOn websites, where the actual game world is hidden beneath what essentially amounts to a dynamically updating Excel spreadsheet with heavy Visual Basic graph scripting. Yet on the same sites we can also find some of the neatest innovations in MMO UI design; indeed, there are even popular Head-Up Display-a-likes, with health bars, mana bars and other information presented around the character in a way that is designed to interfere as little as possible with the player’s view of the game world, after all, what’s the point in having these three dimensional DirectX 11 marvels of graphical splendour if all we’re going to do is cover them up with bar graphs and slide rules?

I think Heavy Rain has recently shown the way that UI design can be taken. It’s a splendid example of thought and attention to the user interface experience because it does the basic thing right and doesn’t get in the way, and it may be that many players will hardly even notice the clever nuanced feedback that it provides to them as they play, which is as it should be. The very best user interfaces are like the steady and dependable butler from Jeeves and Wooster: never fully appreciated by the user, they’re the ones that don’t frustrate or confuse or obstruct, while at the same time providing more information than the user might have otherwise expected to receive. They’re also the ones most likely to slip under the radar of others, because nobody notices the silent stalwart butler subtly guiding his master to victory from out of the shadows of servitude.

Despite the frustration, however, I’m not going to stop playing DDO any time soon, there’s something compelling about running around a room, leaping on to furniture and heaving ineffectually at locked windows along with a bunch of other screaming teenagers in their pyjamas, while small frothing yappy-type dogs with blood-shot eyes try to bite your ankles off.

The Scene: a dungeon which carries the sign ‘Ye Olde Tombe of Peril’. MOUSEBENDER, an adventurer, enters and confronts an AXIOMATIC HORROR.

MOUSEBENDER:
    Good morning, foul spirit.
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Good morning, sir. Welcome to the Tomb of Peril. What can I do for you?
MOUSEBENDER:
    Well, I was rather hoping to purge the dungeon of the foul spirits that infest it, and perhaps perform a spot of light ransacking for a little financial renumeration in the process.
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Oh, I see. I suppose you’ll be wanting to kill me to death, then?
MOUSEBENDER:
    I’m afraid so. Nothing personal!

MOUSEBENDER stabs the abomination with a rapier.

AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    I’m afraid you won’t get very far with that, sir, I have damage reduction from piercing weapons.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Oh never mind, how about a +2 mace?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    I’m afraid it’ll need more than +2, sir.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Tish tish. No matter. Well, fiendish creature, I have an acidic greatsword here!
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Ah. Acid immunity, sir.
MOUSEBENDER:
    It’s not my lucky day, is it? Er, Gwylan’s Blade with sonic damage?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Sorry, sir.
MOUSEBENDER:
    +1 Light Hammer of Pure Good?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Normally, sir, yes. Today I’ve got a special resistance.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Ah. Giant Stalker’s Knife?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Sorry.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Weapons of Kobold Bane, Muck Bane, Goblinoid Bane, Elf Bane?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    No.

MOUSEBENDER throws another four useless swords from his backpack to the growing pile on the floor

MOUSEBENDER:
    +1 Ghost Touch short sword, per chance?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    No.
MOUSEBENDER:
    You can be harmed, can’t you?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Of course, sir. If you …
MOUSEBENDER:
    No, no, don’t tell me. No spoilers, I haven’t looked this up on the wiki.
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Fair enough.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Er, something Axiomatic?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Yes?
MOUSEBENDER:
    Ah, splendid, good job I found this in an earlier chest!

MOUSEBENDER sets about the abomination with a +1 Axiomatic Bastard Sword of Backstabbing, despite lacking the weapon proficiency.

AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Oh, I thought you were talking to me, sir. I’m an Axiomatic Horror, that’s my name, and if you’d succeeded in doing any damage up to this point that would have healed me.

(pause)

MOUSEBENDER:
    +2 Metalline scimitar?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Ah, not as such.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Er, Flametouched cudgel?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    No.
MOUSEBENDER:
    That figures. Predictable really, I suppose. It was an act of purest optimism to have tried the weapon in the first place. Tell me:
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Yes, sir?
MOUSEBENDER:
    Have you in fact got any weakness at all?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Yes, sir.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Now I’m going to ask you that question once more, and if you say ‘no’ I’m going to shoot you through the head. Now, do you have any weakness all?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    No.
MOUSEBENDER:
    (shoots him through the head)
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    You’ll need to use Holy Bolts for that to work, sir.
MOUSEBENDER:
    (logs out)

In the now-Unlimited DDO I’ve been keeping an eye on “Today’s Deals” in the DDO store, and bought several discounted adventure packs of roughly the right level when they popped up. One of these was Tangleroot Gorge, which experienced DDOists will instantly recognise as the aforementioned hokey-cokey-esque in-and-out dungeon, but it hadn’t sounded any alarm bells when I bought it, so when Melmoth and I were looking for a bit of an adventure I casually said “oh, I’ve got this pack called Tangleroot Gorge I haven’t tried yet…” Turned out he’d run it a few times but was game for another, so we trotted along, got out of the Inn into the jungle, and…

… when I came back around I was lying in the hotel room, hands bleeding, the mirror was smashed, I could just remember something about napalm and “The End” by The Doors playing. Serious flashback, man. I almost hit the “unsubscribe” button as a reflex action, though not being subscribed in the first place made that a bit tricky. I needn’t have worried, though, the Return to Tangleroot Gorge was a textbook example of several areas of DDO’s improvements over the years.

It wasn’t *just* repeated runs through Tangleroot that made me give up back at launch, that was just the final frying pan that made the plastic donkey buck. A more significant problem was the need for a group to do anything, with the attendant overhead of forming or finding a group, then constructing an elaborate single transferable voting system with weighted alternatives to decide what to do. With variable difficulty levels in the dungeons now and hirelings to pad out your party it’s now far more flexible; being DPS types, Melmoth and I packed a couple of Cleric contracts for mobile Cure Serious Wounds dispensers and set out.

The first part of the adventure is a fairly large (for DDO) open jungle zone, big enough that a couple of wrong turns could land a laggard in a big enough pile of hobgoblins to cause trouble, and with sufficient canyons and ravines for people to poke their noses over the edge exclaiming “I wonder what’s down thaaaaaaAAAAARGH”. On the plus side, an excellent opportunity to exclaim “He’s fallen in the water!” in the river below, but a trifle annoying, especially if you land on a pointy rock at the bottom without the benefit of feather fall. So far as I can make out this bit hasn’t changed at all, but having a guide with uncanny navigational memory (to the point of being able to talk a guildmate through entirely by memory on voice chat: “you should be seeing a ruined temple coming up on the right, you’ll want to hang a left just before reaching it or the hobgoblins will get cross; if you get to the petrol station on the roundabout you’ve gone too far”) saved a good half hour or more of blundering that dragged things out the first time around, especially on top of the half hour of forming a group up.

At one point inside the dungeon itself, my Spot Sense tingled, indicating a nearby trap, and I got another flashback. The traps around launch seemed to be geared towards a pure rogue of the level of the adventure (if not higher) who hadn’t skimped on Int, put all available skill points into Spot, Search and Disable Traps, taken feats and enhancements to further boost those skills, was wearing Goggles Of Searching and Gloves Of Trap Disabling, had drunk a potion of trap detecting, and never rolled less than 15 on a 20 sided dice. The first run through the place back around launch was carnage, blades flying everywhere, flames shooting down corridors, an occasional cry in party chat of…
“Wait! I sense a…”
*CLICK* *fwooooooosh* STABSTABBURN
“… trap”

One of the advantages of revisiting the same dungeon seven times in a row was that the traps were in the same place each time. You would’ve thought that would make things easier for the rogue, as everyone halted, remembering previous spiky death, expectantly waiting for the trap to be disarmed. I’d boldly stride up to take my place in the spotlight, put on a deerstalker, pull out a magnifying glass and begin the elaborate pantomime triggered by activating the Search skill, to discover… nothing. Strange. Maybe there wasn’t a trap there on this iteration after…
*CLICK* *fwooooooosh* STABSTABBURN
… all. Or maybe I’d just missed it. Oops. Take three, and after the initial search didn’t turn anything up, I activated my limited use Skill Boost ability to perform a more thorough search, and eureka! I managed to find the control panel for the trap! Out with the thieves tools, I’d soon have this thing disarmed and made…
*CLICK* Critical disarm failure *fwoooooosh* STABSTABBURN
… safe. Oh dear.

I swear I only managed to disarm about one trap per twenty attempts, the others resulting in a fairly even mix of plain old failure and pointy-death critical failure. I’ve only got a couple of levels of Rogue this time around (though I’ve been dutifully keeping up Spot, Search, Open Lock and Disable Traps on the Ranger levels as well), and Turbine seem to have ratcheted things back to a rather more sensible level so there’s a very occasional critical failure, but by and large I’ve been able to detect and remove traps without divine intervention.

Anyway; over the course of a couple of nights, with various Waifs coming and going (quite easily, thanks to the flexibility of party composition and guest passes) we looped through Tangleroot Gorge two or three times, and rather than the hideous slog of years back it was a crazy romp. A couple of more experienced players have been bringing a dangerous hint of competency to the Friday night group; most of us can now hold the blunt wooden end of a weapon and stab the enemy with the pointy metal end with only gentle reminders, and we wound up clearing the entire chain on Elite.

Ctharsis: it’s like catharsis, but with more tentacles. (c) Melmoth