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f2p to end game?
grimboj
Member Posts: 2,102
Hey,
How far will I get without spending a penny?
I'm familiar with the game and have got a char to lvl 10 before, for now atleast I'm lvl 4 and haven't done WW but the turbine version of the game seems really locked down, I honestly can't tell if I'm going to struggle at lvl 6 or what.
Cheers
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Note: PlayNC will refuse to allow you access to your account if you forget your password and can't provide a scanned image of the product key for the first product you purchased..... LOL
Comments
You can get to level 20 without spending a penny but you are going to grind the same content into the ground in the process. You can earn enough Turbine Points through multiple character grinds and buying of content on sale with those free points, but be prepared to run a lot of the same quests over and over. You will want to use the free points almost exclusively for content packs. I would suggest Deleras, Gianthold, The Desert and The Veil as packs you use your points on along the way.
You can also go to the Turbine website and look up a guide by a player named Robi.03, he has put together some guides and analyzed some of the ways a F2P can get what they need without spending money. But you will not be able to do it by just playing one character. You will need to make multiple chars on different servers to maximize your TP gains.
It takes time to grind Turbine points. There is possibility to achieve the totally free to play. The highest level of Free quest is LV15 Diluim and Acid Wit in The Twelve.
Lv1-3 Khotos Island
Lv2-4 The Harbor provides many quests, you will turn out to be lv4 in no time
LV3-5 Cerulian Hill 2 quests and Wilderness, Red fang, you may doing Lv2 elite quest in harbor to earn all LV1-3 favor points as well as you will earn Turbine point, save all your Turbine points now
Lv4-6 Freshen air, restless isle
Lv5-7 House K provides a several Lv5 quests
Lv6-8 Red Willow, Bounty hunter
Lv7-9 House P quest and doing those lv5 elite quest in House K, Hearing Height Wilderness
Lv8-10 Stormccleave, Cavern of Koromar
Lv9-11 try to do quest below Lv8 quest on elite
Lv10-12 Axtraxia wilderness as well as other 3 quests
Lv11-13 Atraxia quest and you can join Tempest Raid to earn huge XP
Lv12-14 Repeate Tempest Raid, A reclics of soverign, Made to Order, House K quest
Lv13-15 Mired in Kobold, try to complete Atraxia quest on elite
Lv14-16 Dilium, Acid Wit
You may hit the level cap by now because no free contents to play
By now, you should have earned enough Turbine Points. Spend your point to buy Giant Hold. Because it is most valuable adventure pack. You can find group over Lv15 still doing Giant Hold.
Lv15-17 Doing Giant Hold quest and Wilderness
I suggest once you earned all the Turbine points, don't be sorry to delete your first character, because no matter how good you might think your character is, but it sucks compare with other VIP or TRed character.
Now, you start all over again from Lv 1, repeate the same as above but this time, you earn yourself a Giant Hold pack. The second run will earn enough Turbine Point as well. Buy yourself The Meridia Pack. With this pack, you can start The SHroud Raid and earn yourself something better for your next character.
In general, do not buy any low level pack until you have all high level packs first.
If you are able to hit even higher level in Meridia, if you have extra Turbine Point left, try to buy The Orchard or The Desert, the middle level pack, it will make your leveling even faster. Now, delete your character again and repeate the above.
Now you are higher level so you may want to have The Information Quarter, Lv18 quest pack. It packs many quests. Then, the Amrath pack. If you have other point left, you can buy other lower level adventure pack but I think they are useless, however, you still can spend the point.
First pack: either Gianthold or Meridia.
Second pack: either IQ or Orchard
Third pack: either The Desert or The Red Fens
Fourth pack: either Necro 2 or House D nee quest
The other low levels, dont bother it but you can earn Turbine point easier from there.
Sooner or later, you will own DDO as F2P.
Once you own the game, you may want to buy True Reincarnation Wood instead of deleting your weak character, and after TR, you should buy yourself a +2 supreme tome. Now you going to grind all rare weapons/armors and buy more character slots to keep your stuffs.
I don't agree with some of the advice given by the above poster.
You do NOT have to delete your high level character, nor will it automatically be gimped compared to one created on a VIP account.
One method of grinding out favor for Turbine points is to simply create a character on every server, and get each one to 100 favor, that alone will get you around 600 TP. At 100 favor, the character will be around level 3. You can then continue to level any character, and every 100 favor earned will get you more TP. You can also delete a character and earn another 100 favor from scratch if you want. Sometimes this can be faster in terms of purely grinding out favor.
I would try and earn points for the following packs in this order:
1. Deleras- This chain has a ton of EXP for levels 6-10. You can easily get two levels there going normal, hard, elite. Also this chain has some gear that I would absolutely recommend which includes the best weapon for lower level 2-hand weapon users. Carniflex, it is a great axe with a 17-20 Crit range. This weapon can be a main weapon for many characters from level 4 until level 10-12.
2. Desert- The packs is called Sands of Menechtarun. After Deleras and before you hit Gianthold this is a great area. It is the first Explorer area I think worth farming since it has a number of named items that people want. You can either make a killing selling what you farm or of course keep them for yourself. When I had down time in the game this is one area I was in a lot with even high levels to try and loot farm the chests. The quests are also good EXP and the raid has gear many characters will be interested in.
3. Gianthold- tons of quests that are run constantly as this might still be the best area Turbine ever created in DDO. This is a great area to level.
4. Meridia- The shroud is a must have as are the other quests in this pack. Lots of great gear and the explorer area can be great for loot and EXP. The Shroud raid itself allows you to craft some of the best gear in the game, but it is all bound once you upgrade it so it can not be passed on to other chars on your account, you can true reincarnate though and your next life can use the weapons and gear at mid levels.
5. Amrath and IQ. If the limited DDO end game interests you I suggest getting both of these at some point. You may have to buy some points to do this but they are worth the coin really. There is a decent amount of EXP here and some great gear can be had.
I would absolutely not endorse the +2 supreme tome for a few reasons:
1. You are likely to through your travels and quests accumulate a couple of these tomes anyway.
2. On almost any character you have a couple of stats that are simply not needed or important.
3. Too much TP to improve your couple of needed stats while also improving some unimpotant to worthless ones when you could find these in game and or buy them on the auction house. If your goal is not to spend real money then the +2 supreme tome might be the single worst thig you could waste TP on. Stick to adventure packs unless you want to spend real cash.
Also keep in mind doing something like purchasing VIP status (the make character starting at level 4) through the store is something that makes the grind 100 favor on every server much much easier.
While 1000 favor is not a terrible thing to get in the course of one play through, it only unlocks that on one server. Buying it through the store is all servers and lets you get the per server bonuses much easier.
Concievably you could buy the level 4 unlock once and then grind out a bunch of "free" points. I think you could earn a few thousand TP this way in about a week or so. You would be running harbor/korthos quite alot of course. It would get tiresome.
Edit:
I have been attemtping the equivalent in LOTRO via deed grinding and it is NO WHERE EVEN CLOSE to feasible. Been doing it on a lvl 59 too.
To get even half the equivalent TP you could get in DDO doing this you would have to do not just grinding but mindless grinding spawn camping and doing it on new characters would take forever.
When people say grind in DDO its a doable sorta ok grind you may or may not opt for. The LOTRO TP grind is the eyes bleeding and you going completely bathsit insane kind of grind. And gives much less TP to boot.
The other nice thing in DDO is you simply need to play the game as its meant to be played, you just do it repetitively. Whereas LOTRO is like mindlessly grinding the same Explorere region over and over with no hard/elite settings etc.
Just to clarify for people who haven't played, the favor is unlocked on one server but the points earned are account-wide, meaning any character on any server can use them to purchase packs.
Actually to earn enough favor to buy packs and char slots you really do not play DDO as it was meant to be played. The proven best way to earn FREE TP is to run characters to 100 favor then delete and repeat. If you play DDO as it was meant to be played you really will not earn enough TP to buy all the good packs, TP is kind of front loaded. So in the end the best way to earn TP in DDO is to repeat the first few easy quests until you hit 100 favor then rinse and repeat until your eyes bleed.
I didn't say you were advancing a character as envisioned. But you run dungeons and content. You may do it repetitively but its not like LOTRO where you may actually avoid the content that they are actually selling.
Deeds are generally slayers in LOTRO. The content they sell is quests. They are separate things. In DDO you get favor from instances. The content they sell is instances.
People re-roll characters and play many different alts in DDO all the time. And people have been griding favor since DDO was released. The way to grind out TP in DDO is simply to take a combination of these two things to an extreme.
This is not true of how LOTRO is setup with its TP. Deeds were grinded by some people to get Virtues, just like some people grinded favor in DDO. But only a very small minority of deeds are obtained by running content.
To have the same things in DDO it would be as if only explorer areas gave any favor at all.
But you are still not playing the game as it was meant to be played. The best way to get TP is to never get a character past level 5 and do that over and over.
Unlike the other F2P on the market, DDO still has many pay to play subscribers who paid $15 every month. That is one of reason to keep DDO at better shape due to those P2P players. If your F2P and up to lv20 then you will be able to buy some adventure packs also free.
at lvl 20 if you've got your rep up with most of the factions by that point I'd say you should be able to afford 3 Adventure Packs
You no longer need Drow or 32pt Build and I don't recall what was after that one
Larry, Turbine has done nothing to keep those P2P players. All content in the last year has been aimed at people who use the cash shop. OTher games that follow this idea will also hold onto P2P while going F2P. DDO is not unique in that way any longer.
DDO is the first P2P turned into F2P style. Not because Turbine is the first company doing it, it is because Turbine has very good business strategy. Unlike the other F2P, the item shop from DDO is quite acceptable by so far. I have seen many P2P players bought the adventure pack for F2P players, most of the time was healers. There are many pay to play subscribers in the game. They just want to play in a group whenever they are loging in and DDO is typical a PUG for most of the players.
Also, I have seen many times, people buying reviving cake from item shop while the group wiped. And, people buying hirelings from item shop. Why people wanted to spend 100 favor point just to buy hireling to run maybe 1 or 2 quests? Simply because they enjoy it. I have playing many other F2P mmo but they are all same style, even website looks alike.
DDO is the only one qualified as P2P mmorpg, that's the fact. The other F2P don't even have chance to make their game so valuable to charge fee from players every month. In other words, the company making the game lack of confidence in their own game. Otherwise, learn from Guild War just selling the first copy and play for free. Nope, those F2P are too cheap to sell for any coin. That's how they work on item shop and it sucks.
Larry DDO was not qualified as a P2P MMO. The reason they went F2P was they had nearly no population of paying players left and they took a chance on going F2P. It worked financially. They make a lot more money now. The gameplay itself and content has suffered since that change. DDO is good game to play for a while, but it no longer requires any skill or thought. The game is easy even on the hardest settings.
You see people buying reviving cakes many times? Honestly until I quit a couple of months ago I can not recall the last party wipe I was in. MY characters still have any free cakes Turbine gave away. Never had to spend a dime on those.
People buy item shop hirelings because they are the only ones that allow you to have more then one hireling in a quest. If you want to use 3 hirelings your onluy choice is gold seal, store bought ones.
I understand you love DDO, but when you come here praising it like a holy relic you make the game sound much better then it ever was.
EDIT: Games being F2P from the start does not mean they lack confidence by the way, it means they long ago realized that cash shops work. The reason your beloved Turbine went that route is they realized from other companies that you can offer a lesser product and make more money if you sell things that make the game easier to the unskilled masses.
lol, every f2p has its own story in behind, i was playing ddo since day 1 after ac2 then stop playing until level cap at lv13. the game was more difficult long time ago, but it still difficult to someone today if you have never play enough. I am playing ddo from time to time, sometimes stop playiung up to a couple months as well.
I was trying to play other games but none in my watch list after failed to like them. DDO was the only one on the market provides reasonable item shop items still balancing the game play. Although the contents getting a bit bored to me but the game quality is above average, only a bit laggy, and more importantly is, whenever I wanted to spend time in gameplay, I loging ddo and I found a PUG doing 1 or 2 quests, then logging out for a cigarette. voila.
the longer you play the more favor point you earn, and you could own the game in a long run, just like lifetime subscribers to play for free. I dont really love ddo so much but I got no other better choice, do I? anyway, even I found a new game to play but I am still able to come to ddo at anytime I wanted.
I have been playing Lotro as well while it was p2p, it was a fun game, but it is also a heavy weight grinding, so I chosen ddo as light weight grinding, although you repeating the same quest but it is much better than grinding the same mobs over and over again. when you hit lv20 just do true reincarnation to make your character stronger, and lv20 again, do another reincarnation, believe me, it is much durable and stronger.
the pug group is 6 persons play, so everyone has clear function during the quest, it is clear to tell if your good or bad with your character.
anyway, I wish Turbine may change those colletibles into coin and we could use them to change for faction favor or anything better than the current junks.
I refused to reincarnate any of my level 20s. Turbines failure to create content was not going to convince me to reincarnate a character that was already good. Turbine failed to create a solid endgame experience and because of that I left.
I am just opposite because I prefer DDO has no end game. Because it is an old game, if Turbine remove level cap, for instance, from lv20 up to lv25, adding new contents for end game, and after a short period of time, people will say where is end game again. A game with end game contents means really end. I believe there would be contents for lv20.
As matter of fact, there are already exist in the game, The Battle Field. I am pretty disappointed to see so many level 20 playing battlefield on casual or even normal difficulty. Because elite is not for non-reincarnated players. You must be reincarnated once or twice to be able to experience the real challenge of level 20 contents. So, for those don't want to reincanated players, the performance will be greatly reduced when Turbine release high level contents.
I have seen many lv20 just there to farming ingridients. But the game has changed, Turbine made this game to continue to next life and stealth buff for true reincarnation character. But anyway, there are too many contents for lv1 to 13, only Vale of Twilight for level 16, it is difficult level for reincarnated player to leveling since it requires much more XP and it is a bit too low to play level 19 contents. I wish Turbine would provide more contents for reincarnated player to gain XP easier.
Level cap does not need to go up, Turbine simply needs more level 20 content for the many level 20s.
You do not need to reincarnate to play anything in this game on elite. You do not even need 32 point builds. Nothing in DDO is that hard and that includes EPIC content. Epic by the way is a poor excuse for high level content. I am sure some people feel the need to reincarnate to get better, but not everyone needs that.
I will not use the word endgame since it seems to make people thing end of game. I will call it high level content and DDO lacks it big time. Reincarnation is simply a way to get people to play the same low level crap over and over while marginally making the OP characters more OP. You need nothing from reincarnation to play this game at the highest levels on the hardest difficulty. Continuing to next life on the same stale content is worthless to me and simply a failed experiment for a game that is no longer putting out top grade high level content.
One thing for sure is that people getting bored with lower level, mid level even high level quests because for people wanted to do reincarnation, they are just XP, especially if ones already own multiple characters, so there isn't any fun to repeating same quest over and over again. If you play DDO for longer time, even you are not a rogue but you already knew exactly where are traps as well the location of trap boxes. Really, don't know what else needed to know to doing the same quest. That's why just XP.
Reincarnation making your character stronger with additional stats points plus you can chose a Feat from your past life, the class you had before reincarnation. It's slightly stronger than non-reincarnated. This is for sure. If your in a group with all reincarnated players, you will found its lot easier than non-reincarnated. The choice is your if you wanna reincarnated or not but, reincarnated character is stronger for sure.
Since most capable people already repeating the same quest over and over again even ransacked the quest, it is becoming more soloing who already knew how to get XP in a better way. Or 3 reincarnated players would be capable to run even elite with hirelings. The PUG left for those newbie or non-reincarnated players.
And it becoming more and more difficult to forming up a PUG for quest.
I also believe if there is other better mmorpg on the market, DDO would need to merge servers. I think ddo already need to merge servers now even the peak time still with many players. But the peak time is like a sparkling of electricty short out.
1. only do quests when you're one level above a quest's level
2. get higher level, good adventure packs; there are enough things lower down that you shouldn't waste your TP on lower level adventure packs; so: Ruins of Gianthold or Vale of Twilight
3. bank xp; i.e. when you get enough xp to level up, don't: wait until you're just short of reaching your second level (for example, lvl 8 about to "become lvl 10) to run quests like tip 1.