Improve early epic leveling

[Dattebayo]

Right now it's somewhat painful during the first levels, specially as a melee. You don't have many options for survivability until lvl 23, and many epic strikes for melee are trash until you can upgrade them later. Having in mind the high plat cost to respec trees later on, if you happen to not have a hoard it can be troublesome.
Also the lack of self healing options for non spell casters. There's only 1 good ability that actually heals something based on melee power and that's primal scream with the upgrade at lvl 26... you have to wait until lvl 26. Then renewal is the only other good healing option if you get some devotion, but you need to be able to tank some hits, no burst healing on the other spells if you are not a spell caster with metas. The rejuvenation cocoon is horrible, you can only really benefit from it outside of combat (which has always been the case for that horrible spell), and the GMOF heal doesn't seem to scale with anything in the game except healing amp, it's just a renewal tick with a long cd and a ki cost associated to it which makes it pretty much unusable if you are not in the mantle or a monk.

Once your each lvl 26, solo questing becomes more enjoyable but until then it's a but painfull. At least for melees, spellcasters just one shot everything from afar or cc them and don't have much trouble.
Gives a second wind-like ability on the legendary dreanaught tree, similar to other trees that give the feats and extra uses with a recharge time. But done properly and not like the unyielding sentinel lay on hands that doesn't scale like the description at all, nor with your char levels or with higher of con or cha it seems. Such an investment on a tree to get a renewal tick...

 

[Dattebayo]

i just wanted to say... early epic levelling is fine....

it is the mid levels that need help.

Well, yeah, considering quests at those levels are much harder and you still don't have access to the good stuff on your destiny until 26. I agree that 23-26 may be harder than 20-23 because of the complexity of quests and type of monsters. Luckily there are no kelpies on 20-30 quests...

 

[Dattebayo]

But thing is at lvl 23 you can get shadowdancer upgrade and just destroy every pack of monsters before they are a problem to you, that's why I find 23-26 a bit easier for me. Then you can respec and get the epic strike you want for your build.

 

[Almghandi]

well i find levelling to 23 no problem...

 

[Selvera]

Yeah; level 20-25 can be significantly harder then 1-20 or 26-32 on a melee; but there are very easy and good xp options to get past the bump if you're not kitted out in all the best gear and pastlives to just barrel through them. EH dailies are great xp and give tokens, Estar challanges are often better XP if you can get 3 people together for the druid tree ones, slayers can be even better xp if you have a 6+ person group and a slayer pot running. EH sagas are probably 4th place for xp; but still good and can set you up for a second TR or just give enough favor to get your HP bonuses or DDOP.

 

[Frantik]

I personaly think there needs to be more quests 25-30.

 

[Almghandi]

I personaly think there needs to be more quests 25-30.

in that level range... gianthold, whelooon, storm horns........ the easy ones. 25-30 always flies by for me... such that i dont even normally bother to change out gear

 

[Solarpower]

Leveling up from 20 to 23 is a pain. I almost ready to drop epics altogether.
They need to add more, a lot more quest to that levels range.

 

[Dattebayo]

I personaly think there needs to be more quests 25-30.

I think there's a enough 25-28 but the very last levels are lacking. Necro is a pain to solo, but orchard has good slayer xp that can be done solo somewhat faster than other exploration zones.

I usually end up or repeating quests if the sagas didn't get me to 30 or just jump into ravenloft which is not that hard for a legendary saga and some of the quests have good xp.

 

[Dattebayo]

Leveling up from 20 to 23 is a pain. I almost ready to drop epics altogether.
They need to add more, a lot more quest to that levels range.

Epic necro tombs and crypts could be made into epics from 20-25 to get more options. I think I read somewhere that they were thinking of doing those necro chains an epic version but I may be mistaken.

 

[rabidfox]

Leveling up from 20 to 23 is a pain.

estar 1,2,3 + von 1,2,3,4 and I'm 23+. I could easily mix in borderlands, catacombs, heroic Vecna, other stuff too I wanted variety.

 

[woq]

estar 1,2,3 + von 1,2,3,4 and I'm 23+. I could easily mix in borderlands, catacombs, heroic Vecna, other stuff too I wanted variety.

And demon sands, red fens, phiarlan carnival, twelve quests, slayers, LoD chain..

Melees also aren't some weak creatures in lvl 20-23; Drifting Lotus, Sword Sings + Blade of Discord and Quick Cutter are all excellent ways to deal with low epics.

I haven't felt that lost on melee in early epics tbh and I'm not running some kind of gigacompletionist demigod either. Sharn heroic set, borderlands weapon, pick your epic strike and go to town.

 

[Zaszgul]

As a melee, what's killing you?

As a personal example, I just finished a Monk Henshin life. Ran R3 pretty much exclusively while leveling, and was very fast - excellent completion times in general. Essentially immortal against melee damage (new tumble helps with that) and evadeable spell damage, but there were several places I got ripped to shreds against irresistible DoTs, mostly from champs. The lack of almost any healing at all made this build squishier against DoTs than any other melee I've done recently.

 

[Solarpower]

estar 1,2,3 + von 1,2,3,4 and I'm 23+. I could easily mix in borderlands, catacombs, heroic Vecna, other stuff too I wanted variety.

Good for you. But I can't run either of those right at the 20 lvl.

Well. What kind of answer did I expect ? I always forgot it's not a "DDO Forum" but a "DDO super-mega-ultimate-meta-zergers players forum"...

 

[rabidfox]

Good for you. But I can't run either of those right at the 20 lvl.

Well. What kind of answer did I expect ? I always forgot it's not a "DDO Forum" but a "DDO super-mega-ultimate-meta-zergers players forum"...

They nerf'd those mobs a ton when they redid the epic destinies 2 years ago. I find estar 1,2,3 way easier than it used to be; in the past I had to run them on EH as mobs' HP was too bloated to deal with on a lot of builds. I'm not sure why you're having issue with them; that's a shame, as they're fun quests for that level range. But there's nothing wrong with turning down the difficulty to EH if until your build matures with a few levels, sometimes builds just have that issue.

 

[woq]

Good for you. But I can't run either of those right at the 20 lvl.

Well. What kind of answer did I expect ? I always forgot it's not a "DDO Forum" but a "DDO super-mega-ultimate-meta-zergers players forum"...

What seems to be the problem? Are you lacking damage or survivability? And on what types of builds?

I think most melee types have the tools they need via the various epic strikes available to them, although gaining access to borderlands gear at 21 certainly helps a lot compared to going at it straight out of the gate at level 20.

 

[Dattebayo]

In my case I'm lacking survivability and self healing to be able to stay alive in the fights. Those epic strikes are good but not that great that they can clear waves in seconds, so you need sustain which is lacking in those levels. You get improved shadowform at lvl 23 which helps a lot, but until then mantles are pretty weak, I use fatesinger for the temp hp but is not enough. I do have to lower dif to hard in those levels and yes dots are my worst enemy, specially dragonbolt and niac's, or multiple burning bloods that stack forever and chip away your health. But yes it's easier now than before that it was almost impossible to solo epic hard or elite, always on a group unless you had instakills.
So I was proposing they add a better healing option that scales with melee power in leg dreadnought, or they fix stuff like the lay on hands not scaling properly or boost some other healing ability like the one from GoM is super weak.
Even if mobs die faster, Drow still hit pretty hard and cast a lot of dangerous spells too, and criple you constantly. There's some quests like the ones in the demonweb you need better self heal.

 

[Zaszgul]

In my case I'm lacking survivability and self healing to be able to stay alive in the fights. Those epic strikes are good but not that great that they can clear waves in seconds, so you need sustain which is lacking in those levels. You get improved shadowform at lvl 23 which helps a lot, but until then mantles are pretty weak, I use fatesinger for the temp hp but is not enough. I do have to lower dif to hard in those levels and yes dots are my worst enemy, specially dragonbolt and niac's, or multiple burning bloods that stack forever and chip away your health. But yes it's easier now than before that it was almost impossible to solo epic hard or elite, always on a group unless you had instakills.
So I was proposing they add a better healing option that scales with melee power in leg dreadnought, or they fix stuff like the lay on hands not scaling properly or boost some other healing ability like the one from GoM is super weak.
Even if mobs die faster, Drow still hit pretty hard and cast a lot of dangerous spells too, and criple you constantly. There's some quests like the ones in the demonweb you need better self heal.

Which strike do you use? I've been liking Quick Cutter in Fury a lot lately. Good damage and you get a dodge buff to help you avoid incoming physical damage too. The Fury mantle also offers some healing which scales with your healing amp (unlike fatesinger mantle that scales with nothing), I almost switched to that to help against the DoTs.

Ultimately to overcome the DoTs I was just more aggressive swapping in my spell absorb item (cloak from gianthold) and after gaining a few levels, picking up all the elemental absorbs in GMoF. I also picked up the reactive HoT in Fury, the one that starts auto-healing you if you drop under 40% hp. Those ED options don't come into play until 23+ though.

Agreed that the GMoF heal is weak, low healing numbers, costs a lot of ki, and cooldown is very long.

 

[Almghandi]

Good for you. But I can't run either of those right at the 20 lvl.

Well. What kind of answer did I expect ? I always forgot it's not a "DDO Forum" but a "DDO super-mega-ultimate-meta-zergers players forum"...

so run the 18s and 19s on elite... there are plenty of quests out there

 

[Zvdegor]

EH is super easy. EE is the problem, I don't have any problem running EE on casters or tanky melees, but most melees it's painful because you need to dance too much to not get killed and it just takes too long.

If you want to stand in one place and swing your weapon maybe you need the proper build to do that. It is more like a playstyle question and not a quest difficulty question. (If you have reaper points R1 is easier compared to EE.)
Epic leveling is super easy up till r4. But... you cannot fight standing still because mobs can hit you much more easily. Just look at the kobolds in the Waterworks tunnels. That is how a melee should fight. You hit a mob one or two times than change position, repeat.
For fighting standing still you need to be tanky enough (high ac/prr/mrr), need good selfheal (more sources from racial tree, epic ed tree, spells) and you also need offensive power to bring down enemies afap. Not to mention crowd controll abilities.
Even if a build doesnt have high defensive stats and good selfheal with positionig you can avoid almost every hit. Dont underestimate the power of positioning!

 

[DBZ]

CC pick 1 form and build around it done

Fey dark tree gcs, sdk chains, dragonlords roarr get that no fail now you can run r6s easy

3'rd tree should have some heals yes you'll lose 5 percent dps don't matter soul stones do no damage so

Consecrations or primal or whatever and what epic 20 gear are you using or you still using sharn 15 gear