Downtime Notice: Thursday, March 5th 9:00 AM - 1:00 PM Eastern (-5 GMT)

[droid327]

There is a narrow window between easy, challenging, and too hard. And that window is all over the spectrum for different players. Simply making things harder than easy isn't necessarily making it *better*

When those shifts are accidental and not tied to the actual difficulty scaling mechanic (NHER+) it's almost definitely not doing it right

Keep an absorption item for those situations, and drink a protection pot. That might make them doable still.

The latter is fine advice, but the itemization design in the game makes it hard to have "utility" items you can slot situationally, because that means breaking your Tetris and losing out on some other valuable affix instead and exposing another vulnerability

Also, "having an item" usually means grinding for a specific piece of gear, which often devolves into another progress/content ownership gate. Potions would be a great way to reward players for being prepared, without being a barrier to new players being able to complete content on otherwise-manageable difficulty. But we would need to greatly expand potion options to make them effective...30% absorb in addition to 10/20/30 reduce

 

[The_Apocalypse]

In Time Flies, the version with The Madness of Crowds, those water elementals hurt a lot.

 

[glass_jaws]

Was there some hidden changes today? Looks like Extra Hand on Arcane Trickster isn't reducing metamagic cost at all now. It was already bugged before as not reducing all of them as it said, but it appears to not reduce at all now.

 

[Seppi Pearlsmith]

Different people, different characters, different everything.

An untested and maybe somewhat geared but not really minmaxed leveling character to suddenly get oneshot by R1 trash mobs is a very different conversation from endgame players not having any aspirational goals besides high end raiding and soloing.

What? What are you talking about?

 

[Biggdaddy]

Clicksavers:

Update 78.0.1 Release Notes

Here are the release notes for Update 78.0.1, released on Thursday, March 5th, 2026.
News and Notes:

An initial process has been implemented to mitigate poor game performance in public areas and guild airships during higher population times.

Level 36 items placed into Shared Banks, Character Banks, and Reincarnation Caches now display in list results.

I understand they just started an initial process, but I haven't seen any change to airship lag. Went to the lower deck, step - pause - step - pause, rubberband back around the corner.

Update:
Two days later, going to the lower deck and the bank, flawless.

 

[Defunct]

Been pretty laggy in raids today

 

[droid327]

Was there some hidden changes today? Looks like Extra Hand on Arcane Trickster isn't reducing metamagic cost at all now. It was already bugged before as not reducing all of them as it said, but it appears to not reduce at all now.

Do you have any other sources of meta cost reduction? Could it be a stacking issue like usual?

 

[woq]

What? What are you talking about?

I quoted wrong post! Meant to quote the post below yours, sorry

 

[Seppi Pearlsmith]

I quoted wrong post! Meant to quote the post below yours, sorry

No problem! I tried to make sense of what you said but I couldn't other than you are saying I am not elite neough that's why wisps are frying my monk.

 

[SquireZed]

People should be challenged though.
There is a reason we optimize builds, chase gear and past lives.
Remove the challenge and these goals become meaningless.

Challenge is good, if it's designed well. A random cluster water elementals deleting you from halfway across the map with a salvo of Frost Lances that do each 300% more damage than a critical hit from the quest's boss enemies is not challenge, it's broken balance.

The DDO gatekeepers have the weirdest ideas of what challenge should be. Don't get me wrong, I like being challenged, I have hundreds of hours in Souls-likes and I generally enjoy difficult games when that challenge is rewarding. But having to build specifically to deal with damage spikes from trash mobs because a pair of spells that show up repeatedly throughout the game suddenly is able to one shot unprepared builds throughout the game (including all throughout heroics where new players get their start- optimizing builds, chasing gear, and stacking past lives is fine for diehard veterans and I agree that some challenge is good to make it worthwhile but new players SHOULDN'T NEED TO BE OPTIMIZED TO PLAY THE GAME REASONABLY.)

Having mobs that do crazy spikes and kill you, despite the rest of the quest being appropriate for your power level, is not a fun experience, good design, or a "challenge", it's a balance issue, even if veteran players can just tank it anyway. If your build is, say, Elite ready in all quests at level where frost lance and scorching ray don't show up, but you have to skip quests with mobs with those spells because they one shot you in a salvo (especially since the mobs with these spells sometimes spawn in clusters of the same mob, like water elementals) that's bad design. Old content that is trivially easy for veterans with past lives and gear and optimized builds is suddenly a lot more threatening to new players because of this change, but it's still not a challenge to veterans.

But if you want Dark Souls music to play every time multiple water/fire elementals spawn, you can make that argument. However, if you think new players should just die whenever frost lance or scorching ray comes up, I would love to hear that directly and honestly instead of "but muh challenge is gud" nonsense that pretends balance doesn't matter because with past lives and gear us veterans don't feel it personally. I care because I don't like having to explain "oh yeah by the way this quest will kill you if you're not rocking <list of effects>" for random quests when I play with newer players, and suddenly that includes elemental resist, protection, and absorption because of two spells.

 

[glass_jaws]

Do you have any other sources of meta cost reduction? Could it be a stacking issue like usual?

Nope, thats the only source of reduction I have at level 13. On my previous life it worked correctly, but for now it seems to not be doing anything.

 

[glass_jaws]

I ended up respeccing my Trickster and it's back working now. Not sure why it got disabled.

 

[Aaumini]

Some of the items seem to lose the info about their minimum level for some reason, been going on quite a while. If you're looking for something in particular use the item type filters as they always work regardless of indicated level.

Happens if you move an item to shared bank and drop them on a tab rather than in the window listing items.

 

[Phaedra]

Happens if you move an item to shared bank and drop them on a tab rather than in the window listing items.

This isn't the only cause, as BTC items do it in the TR stash too.

 

[Aaumini]

This isn't the only cause, as BTC items do it in the TR stash too.

I see. Maybe those could be losing their ML if being dropped on a tab in character bank and inheriting the (lost) ML after reincarnating.

I never keep my TR cache for more than a few minutes after doing a TR, always emptying it into character bank main tab straight away. I never noticed items losing their ML this way.