Choose My Adventure: Starting my low-level wolfventures in Dungeons & Dragons Online

I don’t know if you all know this about me, but I really like wolves. They’re fascinating creatures, they represent some qualities that I admire and attempt to emulate in my own life (none of which involve running down wild game and eating it raw in the snowy silence of the forest, by the way), and they’re some of the most beautiful animals in the wild kingdom. So in hindsight, it was kind of odd how I wasn’t immediately using the Plague Wolf Wild Shape ability for my Dungeons & Dragons Online character.

Well, thanks to the polls from last week’s Choose My Adventure, that mistake was quickly corrected. And beyond my own adoration of wolves, it was an overall extremely smart choice.

The combat power difference was almost night and day the moment I started doing quests exclusively in wolf form, even before I made sure to spend my enhancement points in the various Druid skill trees. I was still basically holding down the left mouse button interspersed with a couple of spells and self-buffs, sure, but fights were wrapping up a whole heck of a lot faster than before.

Obviously that only improved once I made it to level three to unlock more feats and used those aforementioned skill tree points. I got a passive that improved my Wild Shape damage, spent a few points into the part of the Druid tree that enhanced my wolf form, and got a pretty tasty fire weapon that I think has had an affect on my basic wolf attacks. At least as far as I can tell; I’m pretty sure some of my bites were lighting enemies on fire, even though my D&D knowledge suggests that my character should be using the wolf stat block.

This, of course, made the quests that I took up a bit of a dawdle for the most part. And yes, obviously I took up multiple quests, though I did start with the winner from last week’s poll choices. I just went through the top five in order of first to fifth.

I don’t immediately recall some of these quests, I’m going to be honest. Or at least, if they were things I’ve done before, I don’t remember them. Surely these aren’t new though. I’m all but positive that Stormreach hasn’t been touched by SSG in literal years. I just don’t seem to remember how The Kobolds’ New Ringleader had so much combat, for example.

Still, the wolfing out made quick work of the foes. I even have a sweet drop kick move that has a chance to knock over foes, which enabled me to get off a couple of additional spells that meant all but certain doom for whatever had the misfortune of standing before my wolfy might. Sure, this hasn’t been challenging, but damn has it been fun. I also made sure to enhance my takedown move the moment I had skill tree points to spend.

But what happens when I do try to push the envelope a bit? I am still a free player, so I did have to go through the quests on normal to unlock them on hard, so that was my next personally set goal: find out whether this change in difficulty would actually be difficult. And to further see how things were different, I made sure to run the mission that I was re-running in human form.

In fairly short order, I found out that hard was mostly kind of hard! The added wrinkle of being in human form was exacerbated by the fact that I was facing skeletons with a slashing weapon, making fights take that bit longer, but I didn’t really die to the encounter so much as to the traps. Or at least to the misunderstanding of how large the trap hurt boxes are. Those lighting strikes apparently are much larger than I had thought.

After facing my first death (and paying out of the nozzle to clear the death debuff with in-game gold because I was impatient), I tried again, only with more wolf time. This made things much more manageable, as did respecting the apparently absolute huge areas of effect that the traps invisibly painted on the floor. I did another couple of quests on hard and had similarly good results; even the Kobolds’ Ringleader quest, with as much combat as it had, was no match for my Barkskin-coated wolf form. And they’ve been pretty rewarding too, at least in terms of XP if not in terms of loot.

So once again, I find myself having a pretty good time despite the fact that it seems as if I’ll never leave Stormreach by the time this round of CMA is over with. But that’s fine. I’m having more fun with this Druid than I expected to. But now it is time to look at next steps.

Obviously I’ve been enjoying doing level two hard quests, but as I mentioned earlier, I am also level three right now – about halfway into the five ranks needed for level four to be specific. So that means it’s time to once more determine what I should focus on for the next weekend’s runs in DDO.

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Poll number two is once again about buildcraft, so I’m asking fora bit of advice from any of the fellow wolf friends out there. I haven’t gotten a lot of skill tree points yet, but the ones I have gotten have mostly focused on the Nature’s Warrior tree (aka the wolf time tree), though I’ve also spent an equal number of points in the tree that empowers my spell damage and some melee. I suppose if I’m mostly going Doggo Mode, that’s where my spending should go from here on out, but I’d rather ask…

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Polls will close at 1:00 p.m. EST on Friday, January 23rd. In the meantime, I’ll just sit on my hands and see how this works out. Or more like sit on my paws, I guess.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.